Corporate Conquests: Business, the State, and the Origins of Ethnic Inequality in Southwest China 9781503612174

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Corporate Conquests

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Corporate Conquests Business, the State, and the Origins of Ethnic Inequality in Southwest China C. Patterson Giersch

Stanford University Press Stanford, California

Stanf ord Unive rsit y Pre ss Stanford, California © 2020 by C. Patterson Giersch. All rights reserved.

Portions of Chapter 4 were originally published as “The Origins of Disempowered Development in the Tibetan Borderlands” in Frontier Tibet: Patterns of Change in the Sino-Tibetan Borderlands, ed. Stéphane Gros, © 2019 by Amsterdam University Press. Reprinted by permission of the author and the publisher. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system without the prior written permission of Stanford University Press. Printed in the United States of America on acid-free, archival-quality paper Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Giersch, C. Patterson, author. Title: Corporate conquests : business, the state, and the origins of ethnic inequality in southwest China / C. Patterson Giersch. Identifiers: LCCN 2019031942 (print) | LCCN 2019031943 (ebook) | ISBN 9781503611641 (cloth) | ISBN 9781503612167 (paperback) | ISBN 9781503612174 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Minorities—China, Southwest—Economic conditions— 19th century. | Minorities—China, Southwest—Economic conditions— 20th century. | Corporations—China, Southwest—History. | China, Southwest—Economic conditions—19th century. | China, Southwest— Economic conditions—20th century. | China, Southwest—Commerce— History. | China, Southwest—Ethnic relations—History. Classification: LCC HC428.S75 G54 2020 (print) | LCC HC428.S75 (ebook) | DDC 305.800951/509041—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019031942 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019031943 Cover design: Angela Moody Cover photo: Carrying brick tea to Dartsedo, ca 1907–09. Ernest Henry Wilson, Eastern Asian Historical Photography Collections, Arnold Arboretum Library, Harvard College. Typeset by Kevin Barrett Kane in Minion Pro

For my family, especially my father, Charles P. Giersch (1940–2018)

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Contents

List of Illustrations  ix Acknowledgments  xi Introduction  1 Part I: From Muleteers to Millionaires: The Rise of Private Corporations Chapter 1: The Muleteers  23 Chapter 2: Families  50 Chapter 3: The Revolutionaries  66 Chapter 4: The Excluded  95 Part II: The Place of the State: The Rise of State Corporations Chapter 5: Mining  123 Chapter 6: The Technocrat  144 Chapter 7: Corporations, the State, and Ethnic Difference  171 Epil o gue: Conquest of Corporations  193 Appendix: Tin Production and Silk Exports  211 Notes  213 Bibliography  253 Index  275

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Illustrations

Maps Map 1: China and Southeast Asia  xiv Map 2: Yunnan, Upper Burma, and Northern Vietnam  xv Map 3: Northern Yunnan, Western Sichuan, and Kham  xvi Figures Figure 1: Fang Kesheng with a Survey Team from the Institute of History and Philology, April 1935 2 Figure 2: Miao Yuntai in the University of Minnesota’s Chinese Students Club, 1917 17 Figure 3: The Old Cobbled Road from Heshun to Burma  24 Figure 4: A Yunnan Mule and Pony Train All Loaded Up, 1922 25 Figure 5: The Elegant Entrance to Yan Zizhen’s European-Style Villa  38 Figure 6: Yan Baocheng’s European Villa  39 Figure 7: Yan Lineage Temple in Xizhou  57 Figure 8: One of the Lineage Temples in Heshun  58 Figure 9: The Bisezhai Train Station  75 Figure 10: A Train Mural on a Courtyard Wall  77 Figure 11: Cun Haiting  78 Figure 12: Carrying Brick Tea to Dartsedo  100 Figure 13: Dartsedo Monasteries  101 Figure 14: Yang Kecheng at Harvard Business School  172 Figure 15: Zhefang’s Lord of the Sky (saopha) Duo Yingpei  203

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x Illustrations

Tables Table 1: Tin Production in Gejiu, Yunnan, 1900–1936  211 Table 2: Sample of Raw Silk Export Volumes to Burma from Western China (Sichuan Silk Shipped via Yunnan), 1899–1937  212

Acknowledgments

The project that culminated in this book began many years ago on hot, dusty days traveling through the Guangxi countryside with Steve Miles and Linling Gao-Miles, whose indefatigably cheery approach to the never-ending search for local sources was an inspiration. As the project progressed, others have been incredibly supportive, sharing time and insights in ways that made this project better. Given the current political climate in mainland China, I will reluctantly wait to thank publicly these extraordinary colleagues. My forays into the demanding field of Kham history were challenging, but I enjoyed the good fortune of joining Stéphane Gros’s research program, “Territories, Communities and Exchanges in the Sino-Tibetan Kham Borderlands (China),” and attended two outstanding workshops in Paris. In May 2015, I served as discussant for papers on Kham; it was an opportunity to learn from superb scholars such as Stéphane, Patrick Booz, Rémi Chaix, Fabienne Jagou, Scott Relyea, Tenzin Jinba, and Yudru Tsomu. In May 2016, I presented the ideas that would become chapter 4. My sincere gratitude to Stéphane and Tsomu (who provided the romanization for Tibetan names) for improving my chapter, although I am responsible for any remaining errors. I thank those who invited me to work out my ideas at their institutions. Material from chapter 3 was presented at the University of Chicago, EATRH Workshop. Special thanks to Benjamin Miller and Aliz Horvath for making my trip to Chicago so valuable. Material from chapters 5 and 6 was presented at “Centring the Margins: Environmental Histories of Yunnan and China’s

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xii Acknowledgments

Southwestern Frontiers” at Fudan University, and I thank Andrea Janku and Yang Yuda for inviting me to join such a distinguished group. At Wellesley College, I am indebted to my History Department and other colleagues, who provided comments on early versions of chapters 1 and 2. Eric Hilt was especially generous with his expertise. Sarah Moazeni provided critical help with the maps, and, once again, the Interlibrary Loan services at Clapp Library were outstanding. Thank you, Angie Batson and Jamie Jesanis. Research awards provided much-needed travel funds, and I am happy to acknowledge the support of the American Philosophical Society through a Franklin Research Grant (2015–2016) and Wellesley College through several Grants for Scholarly Activities, including one from the Babette Becker Asian Studies Fund. My research was aided by the professionals at the British Library; the Heshun Library; the Archives of the Institute of Modern History, Academia Sinica; the National Archives at Kew; the Tengchong Library; the Yunnan Provincial Archives; and the Yunnan Provincial Library. I received extraordinary help in collecting the images, and I thank Lisa Pearson, Larissa Glasser, and Harvard University’s Arnold Arboretum Horticultural Library Archives; Melissa Murphy and the Baker Library Special Collections; and Su-Fang Lin and the Institute for History and Philology at Academia Sinica. I also thank Jia Zhiwei and the Heshun da mabang Museum. At Stanford University Press, it has been my privilege to work with Marcela Cristina Maxfield, who guided the manuscript submission and review process so expertly, and I greatly appreciated Sunna Juhn’s attention to detail. The process of production was overseen by Anne Fuzellier Jain, and I thank her for her excellent work. Two anonymous readers provided critiques that have greatly improved the book. I gratefully acknowledge permission to republish “Borderlands Business: Merchant Firms and Modernity in Southwest China, 1800–1920,” copyright © 2014 Society for Qing Studies and Johns Hopkins University Press; it was first published in Late Imperial China 35, no. 1 (2014), 38–76, and it is reprinted here with permission by Johns Hopkins University Press. I also acknowledge permission to republish “Yunnanese Transnational Business Firms in the Early Twentieth Century: Xizhou’s Yongchangxiang as Case Study,” first published in Southwest China in a Regional and Global Perspective (c. 1600–1911), Metals, Transport, Trade and Society, edited by Ulrich Theobald and Cao Jin (Leiden: Brill, 2018), 424–444.

Acknowledgments xiii

Last, but not least, comes my family, who, with one exception, has seen me through another book. I cannot convey how much their support means. Thus, I dedicate this book to Anne, Connor and Lucas, my mother Mary Victor, and especially my father, Charles, who edited my first book but, unfortunately, could not do the same for this one.

Map 1.  China and Southeast Asia

S ou rces: ESRI; DeLorme; ArcWorld; CIA World Factbook; GMI; NIMA; Times Atlas; USGS; “CHGIS, Version 4” (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Yenching Institute, January 2007); “CHGIS, Version 6” © Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies of Harvard University and the Center for Historical Geographical Studies at Fudan University, 2016; “ChinaW Dataset” © Zumou Yue, G. William Skinner, and Mark Henderson (Davis: University of California, Regional Systems Analysis Project, January 2007); “World River and Lake Centerlines, 1:50 million” Tom Patterson and Nathaniel Vaughn, Nov 2012. Using: ArcGIS [GIS software]. Version 10.5. Redlands, CA: Environmental Systems Research Institute, 1999-2016.

Map 2.  Yunnan, Upper Burma, and Northern Vietnam

S ou rces: ESRI, Garmin International (formerly DeLorme Publishing Company); ArcWorld; CIA World Factbook; GMI; NIMA; Times Atlas; USGS; “CHGIS, Version 4” (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Yenching Institute, January 2007; “CHGIS, Version 6” © Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies of Harvard University and the Center for Historical Geographical Studies at Fudan University, 2016; “ChinaW Dataset” © Zumou Yue, G. William Skinner, and Mark Henderson (Davis: University of California, Regional Systems Analysis Project, January 2007); “World River and Lake Centerlines, 1:50 million” Tom Patterson and Nathaniel Vaughn, Nov 2012. Using: ArcGIS [GIS software]. Version 10.5. Redlands, CA: Environmental Systems Research Institute, Inc., 1999-2016.

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Map 3.  Northern Yunnan, Western Sichuan, and Kham

S ou rces: World Water Bodies comes from ESRI, Garmin International, Inc. (formerly DeLorme Publishing Company); DeLorme; ArcWorld; CIA World Factbook; GMI; NIMA; Times Atlas; USGS; “CHGIS, Version 4” (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Yenching Institute, January 2007); “CHGIS, Version 6” © Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies of Harvard University and the Center for Historical Geographical Studies at Fudan University, 2016; “ChinaW Dataset” ©) Zumou Yue, G. William Skinner, and Mark Henderson (Davis: University of California, Regional Systems Analysis Project, January 2007). Using: ArcGIS [GIS software]. Version 10.5. Redlands, CA: Environmental Systems Research Institute, Inc., 1999-2016.

Corporate Conquests

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Introduction

Fang Kesheng made his way from westernmost Yunnan to the Chinese capital of Nanjing, where he would serve as a delegate to the first People’s Participatory Conference (see figure 1). Upon arrival and before the conference opened, Kesheng prepared Ideas, a plan for the economic and political development of western Yunnan.1 With this plan, he sought to educate powerful Nationalist government officials about his home region, the Tai-ruled domains along the Yunnan-Burma border. For Chinese, the region was the Teng Long border region, a name referring to the important towns of Tengchong and Longling. But much of the region was not Chinese culturally or linguistically; it was more diverse but dominated politically by the Tai elites from principalities such as Nandian, Ganyai, and Mangshi. From a Han Chinese perspective, the Tai elite were a dangerous, anachronistic nobility called tusi, native officials who had inherited the feudal right to govern but were no longer welcome in a modernizing China. From a Tai point of view, the leaders of these principalities were the saophas, the lords of the sky, often well-educated hereditary princes who managed local bureaucracies, marshaled their own troops, and intermarried to form a network of kinship and shared culture reaching into northern Burma’s Shan States, which were the domains of other Tai princes.2 Kesheng sought to convince Nationalist officials to preserve Tai elite authority while accepting his plan for sustainable economic development in the borderlands communities, including Kesheng’s home principality of Mangshi. He wanted to transform the local economy from one in which Tai farmers produced primary products, often for sale to Han merchants, into a modern IN LATE 1947,

1

2

Introduction

FIGURE 1.   Fang

Kesheng with researchers from the Institute of History and Philology, April

1935. Fang is in the center. His brother, Fang Keguang, is to his left.

Sou rc e : Image courtesy of the Institute of History and Philology, Academia Sinica. Reprinted with permission.

economy consisting of diversified cash cropping and light industry using local raw materials to produce finished goods for export to China proper (neidi) and abroad. Kesheng further envisioned a region well connected through transport networks and well served by educational and financial institutions. All of this, he argued, would produce a society in which the barriers between the Tai minority and China’s Han majority were lowered, reducing ethnic conflict. At first glance, Kesheng’s vision of development seems reasonable, but there were plenty of reasons that Ideas faced enormous obstacles. To preserve local authority, Kesheng would need to counter near-hysterical media portrayals of the Tai nobility as traitors and separatists.3 This reputation originated in the run-up to Burmese independence in 1948, when it was reported, with more than a little exaggeration, that the Tai of western Yunnan were plotting with British colonial authorities and the Tai elite of the Shan States to seek independence. To envision a form of development that empowered Tai producers and local communities, moreover, Kesheng would need to both confront the

Introduction 3

private Chinese companies controlling regional commerce, as well as challenge foundational conceptions, reinforced by decades of surveys and state planning, of borderlands people as backward and in need of state-controlled intervention to raise them from their sorry states.4 If Kesheng’s plan was self-serving, it was also a radical, alternative vision for a Chinese national future, a vision of ethnic cooperation and empowerment for minorities that has only rarely been embraced over the past seventy years. It was a vision embedded in a tradition of Tai elite thinking that dated back to the twentieth century’s first few years, when the Ganyai principality’s lord of the sky, saopha Dao Anren, began planning for a vibrant, local commercial economy.5 And it was a vision that would largely fail. Despite its stated commitments to ethnic equality, the Communist state would take power just a year after Kesheng’s proposal and would eventually mobilize the modern prejudices and ethnic hierarchies that Kesheng sought to combat. Throughout China’s vast borderlands, far beyond Yunnan, the Maoist regime (1949–1976) would embrace earlier patterns of inequality and disempowerment by undermining minority leaders, forcing minority farmers to remain in agriculture by limiting other options, and developing industries that served majority-Han communities, leaving others behind because they were deemed less trustworthy or less capable.6 In the aftermath of China’s more recent market reforms, the inequalities continue; most minority citizens have seen income gaps between themselves and Han citizens widen. In 2000, the regime sought to stem the growing inequality by launching the Great Western Development Program and other poverty-reduction plans, some of which produced positive results. Standards of living were raised, although this needs to be understood in context: in Yunnan, investment in tourism and local enterprises tended to advantage some locales but left behind many others. The cost in terms of the commoditization of minority cultures and the uneven geographic distribution of benefits, with only a few towns and mostly outside investors benefiting, suggests lessthan-complete success. Thus, market-based, state-led development has raised many from poverty while also reinforcing inequalities along spatial and ethnic lines—inequalities reinforced because minority citizens often have less access to good education, fewer opportunities to move out of agricultural work, and more difficulty in finding urban jobs due to discrimination in hiring. Increasing state investment has also brought, in some places, rapid growth in the security industries, which are used in Tibet and Xinjiang to segregate and monitor

4

Introduction

minority citizens. Based on the expert analysis of Bjorn Gustafsson, the bottom line is that “most of China’s rural ethnic minorities lag behind the Han. They have lower average per capita income and higher rates of poverty.”7 The costs of inequality include ethnic tension in places such as Xinjiang.8 Based on recent scholarship, it is safe to say that inequality along ethnic lines is still endemic to China. But why? A simple answer points to geography. Gustafsson argues that the urban-rural income gap is the most important factor structuring inequality: because many minority communities are rural, they are poorer.9 This makes perfect sense, of course, but it does not explain why rural China, and especially the largely minority regions of the rural northwest and southwest, have particularly tenacious patterns of inequality. Nor does it explain how there can be patterns of ethnic inequality within these poor regions. To probe these problems more deeply, we need to realize that work in economic geography demonstrates that the fixed aspects of geography, including climate, terrain, and natural resources, are important to making some regions and communities more prosperous than others, but so too are the historical events and human institutions that structure access to and exploitation of these resources.10 If we take human agency and historical events seriously, then it is plausible that geographical regions are dynamically transformed by important ideas and hierarchies of power that provide access to capital and resources to some, but not others.11 In other words, we must consider that China’s borderlands and its minority communities may have been underserved by economic development not simply because of location and geography, but because of how their home regions and their populations have been perceived and treated over long periods. As Judd Kinzley has argued, we need to deepen our understanding of modern China by analyzing the history of spatial and ethnic patterns of unequal economic development.12 There are a few good studies of spatial and ethnic inequalities for the People’s Republic of China (1949–). In her work on Tibet, for example, Emily Yeh reveals how the party conceived of development as a generous gift to Tibetans, but undergirding the policies of development were beliefs in the low capabilities of Tibetans and the subsequent use of outside Han experts and Han migrants to implement development schemes. The gift of development therefore facilitated Han domination of new economic opportunities, leaving Tibetans marginalized economically and victimized by largely successful efforts to depict them as backward and underdeveloped.13 As Yeh demonstrates, the ideas that officials and migrants had about Tibetans are important to understand, because those ideas

Introduction 5

guided the reordering of Tibetan spaces. Marginalization is in part a product of policy, but policy is influenced by party leaders’ deep-seated prejudices. As Andrew Martin Fischer argues, leaders’ ideas matter a great deal because the state has consistently denied Tibetans the power to make decisions about resources and development. As a result, Tibet has an economic structure, says Fischer, that “is effectively very similar to that of a colonial-type economy.” There are high degrees of dependence on outside power holders and outside resources; the control of development funds usually rests in the hands of Han Chinese– dominated institutions.14 This leads to disempowered development, as Fischer calls it, and, while plenty of communities fight against disempowerment, the policies enabling it have influenced much of China’s borderland regions.15 Disempowering indigenous peoples is not unique to China, and literature from other places reveals how devastating it can be to deny local decision-making power. In the United States, for example, Native American reservations have long suffered extraordinary levels of economic distress. For white Americans, these conditions became naturalized. Poverty and dependency, it was believed, were the inevitable outcome of primitive lifestyles and backward cultures. But Native American dependency was not a product of culture or primitiveness; instead, it was imposed from the outside.16 In the United States, the advent of market economics has long been linked to the patterns of dependence among indigenous peoples, and that dependence has been exacerbated by the state. As early as the 1920s, the U.S. federal government introduced economic development schemes onto Native American reservations, but policymaking and control of resources remained in the hands of outsiders. It was only in the 1980s, after multiple efforts to return developmental autonomy to indigenous communities, that some tribes began to experience economic success. According to work by Stephen Cornell and Joseph Kalt, successful tribes share one crucial trait: they gained control over economic decision making and institutions. Cornell and Kalt could find no other factor as uniformly important to success.17 As in the United States, the People’s Republic of China has usually prevented indigenous communities from gaining control over resources and development decisions. In Xinjiang since the 1950s, the party, state, and military have dominated development and turned the region into one largely run by state-owned enterprises (SOEs).18 In other borderlands provinces, including Yunnan, where minority indigenous populations are numerous, SOEs also control unusually high percentages of the economy.19 However, there have been some efforts to return control to local communities. In 1985, for example, the

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Introduction

Guizhou provincial government began to use tourism as a developmental strategy. The economy did not grow as quickly as in neighboring Yunnan Province, where tourism was also a development strategy, but in Guizhou, poverty rates declined more rapidly because of local participation in new business opportunities. In contrast, Yunnan allowed outside investors to dominate tourism, thus excluding locals from many opportunities.20 Guizhou’s approach to poverty reduction seems to be an outlier, and as Chih-yu Shih has argued, poverty and cultural backwardness are assumed to be endemic to minority lives, an assumption that makes minority agency more difficult.21 But why might this be? When and how did trajectories of disempowerment develop? While most scholars have looked to the history of the People’s Republic and the Communist Party for answers, this book peers deeper into the past to demonstrate that the problem is not simply a party problem, although the party’s despotic and discriminatory tendencies certainly exacerbate it. By focusing on the borderlands regions of Yunnan and eastern Tibet’s Kham (administered primarily by Sichuan Province), the book traces the multifaceted origins of disempowered development back to a series of changes occurring from the 1870s to the 1940s. During this period, borderlands communities became enmeshed in more intense networks of regional and global trade. In Yunnan and Kham, those networks were often built by a new form of private trading corporation that emerged in the nineteenth century: Yunnanese shareholding partnerships. However, this was also the era when, for the first time, the state built its own modern corporations. As these corporations, both private and state, gained control over trade networks, they also gained greater access to local resources, at the expense of indigenous communities. This was also the period in which those same borderland indigenous communities were subjected to new nation-building projects emanating from the national and provincial capitals. During the process of nation building, non-Han elites were transformed rhetorically from legitimate rulers integral to the Qing empire’s survival to denigrated, backward, and often illegitimate (in the eyes of the Chinese state but not necessarily those of local communities) competitors for power who had no place in the modern nation. Both of these developments constitute core elements of China’s particular transition to modernity, and while this book focuses on the Southwest, these developments reverberated throughout China’s vast borderlands. To narrate these important, multifaceted changes, the book introduces a range of protagonists from different backgrounds, including Yunnanese

Introduction 7

businessmen such as Yan Zizhen and Cun Haiting; a Khampa medicine collector named Peldengyel; famous Qing (1636–1912) and Republican (1912–1949) officials such as Zuo Zongtang, Zhao Erfeng, Cen Yuying, and Long Yun; Yunnanese technocrats such as Miao Yuntai and Yang Kecheng; and Tai saophas such as Fang Kesheng and Dao Anren. While these individuals are among the human protagonists who helped transform the Southwest, the other agents of history in the book are the corporations: private, state, and joint public-private ventures. I believe that the book’s originality lies in the study of both private and state corporations as they developed across the volatile decades spanning the late Qing dynasty to the early People’s Republic. By combining the study of the private and the state, we can understand how new business practices combined with new ideas about territory, ethnicity, and state power to transform these corporations into agents of disempowered development. My interest in this topic was first raised by a simple puzzle I encountered in the Qing dynasty archives, the sprawling collections of documents housed in both Beijing and Taipei. In earlier years, I read hundreds of these documents for an investigation into the expansion of the Qing state into the lands dominated by Tai and Tibeto-Burman-speaking indigenous communities. As I read, I frequently encountered peddlers and merchants. In the writings of Qing officials, these traders were often portrayed as evildoers who sold on credit to the unsuspecting, simple, and uncivilized peoples whose communities dominated the Qing borderlands. While these writings reflected some important truths, the realities of merchant life and activity were often hidden from view, and though I tried to capture a respectable historical portrait of these merchants, I was unsatisfied with the result. And so I continued to wonder about the private merchants of China’s borderlands. How were their businesses run? What was their impact on the communities in which they lived and worked? This book is an answer to those questions, and it is designed to enrich our study of merchant and corporate activity in the borderlands, where merchants were integral to Qing imperial expansion.22 This book is different from earlier work, which tends to focus on the Northwest and to emphasize state-merchant relations during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Here, I follow southwestern merchants deep into the twentieth century, treating the rise of their private corporations as a trend that was relatively independent of state activities. While some merchants supplied Qing military efforts, especially in Kham,23 and many merchants benefited from certain state actions, it was not until World War II (1937–1945) that the largest private Yunnanese corporations

8

Introduction

attracted the attention of economic planners seeking to harness them for stateled development. To capture this relatively autonomous rise of private corporations and subsequent integration into state development plans, the book is divided into two parts. The first traces the origins and development of Yunnan private firms, including their tremendous impacts on two types of local communities: the hometowns of corporate ownership and the home villages of Khampas (Tibetan-speaking inhabitants of Kham). To trace this history, we cannot be limited by the spatial confines of Yunnan Province itself. Inspired by work that provocatively encourages liberation from traditional spatial categories, part I reveals how histories of trade and corporations must be placed in transregional or global frameworks, meaning, as Melissa Macauley argues, that they must “be analyzed across the multiple sites within which historical interactions occur.”24 For Yunnanese corporations, those multiple sites include Southeast Asian trading towns, as well as the villages and pastures of Kham, where traditional medicines, one of the commodities that made the firms wealthy, were collected. Part II begins with a history of modern, mechanized mining in Yunnan and goes on to explain the rise of Yunnan province’s innovative state-run corporations; it also places these developments within the larger context of evolving concepts and practices of territorial control, citizenship, ethnicity, and economic development. In the final chapter and the Epilogue, the book reveals how the two initially disparate historical stories—of private corporations and of modern state building—become entangled as new, powerful state corporations and institutions sought to dominate both private enterprise and the development of the borderlands. In focusing on corporations, this book not only provides a new way to understand the structuring of power in China’s modern borderlands; it also applies the lens of ethnicity to the story of modern China as a whole. Challenging the assumption that modernity moved from east to west, from the coastal cities to the isolated inlands, the book reveals how important new concepts about state power, including the use of corporate institutions and markets to transform allegedly backward rural peoples, were forged in the pre-Communist borderlands. In this book, the term corporation is defined based on the realities of the institutions that existed in the Southwest. A corporation was a shareholding institution established by private owners or the state to carry out commercial or industrial activities, or both.25 I use the term interchangeably with firm and

Introduction 9

company. In the years before the 1930s, most of the private corporations mentioned were shareholding partnerships, and the state-run corporations were initially joint-stock companies formed under the Qing policies for state supervision and merchant management (guandu shangban). After 1904, most of the state-run corporations were incorporated under the new Company Law. From the 1930s until 1949, many of the corporations mentioned were limited liability stock companies registered under the Company Law updated in 1929.26 These legally registered corporations included both private corporations and the provincial corporations created by Yunnan’s activist, autonomous provincial government. In the aftermath of the Communist occupation of Yunnan, the nature of the corporations began to change as the new government incorporated staterun firms into their bureaucratic state planning administration and created new companies that effectively competed with private corporate activity until the private firms submitted to joint state ownership (gongsi heying). Structuring the entire book is its positioning at the intersections of the histories of business, state building, and the borderlands. If we wish to understand what China was, is, and will become, we need to incorporate the study of business institutions into our broader histories. Archive-based studies of Chinese companies have revealed the diversity of corporate ownership and finance strategies.27 I therefore treat Chinese businesses as historical institutions rather than as stereotyped, ahistorical Chinese family companies.28 By investigating the historical realities of finance and management, I reveal that shareholding partnerships were particularly attractive to private entrepreneurs. Their adoption of various forms of record keeping and management techniques, moreover, allowed them to transform business relationships, align ownership and management interests, and expand their reach well beyond Yunnan—into Burma, South Asia, China proper, and Kham. Following in the footsteps of the history of capitalism, this book moves beyond traditional business histories to examine how businesses transformed local and regional political and cultural contexts.29 In Chinese history, this is exemplified by Elisabeth Köll’s study of Zhang Jian and his companies, which demonstrates the impact an entrepreneur might have on a region’s social and economic development. In Köll’s study, Zhang’s ideas about modernity and his ambition for personal prestige transformed his city and the people living in it.30 If Köll’s work helps us understand how corporations might transform human spaces and activities, then related studies investigate how the business elite transformed themselves. The wealthy, for example, represented themselves

10

Introduction

through cultures of distinction, whether it was the bourgeoisie in nineteenthcentury America or the new merchants in early twentieth-century Shanghai, who pioneered ways to differentiate themselves from other Chinese and to seek legitimacy through their contributions to philanthropy and nation building.31 In Yunnan, the emerging merchant elite developed their own practices of self-representation and legitimization by reinvesting corporate profits in their hometowns to build elaborate private homes and public institutions such as libraries and schools. In the process, these merchants articulated a particularly Yunnanese vision of modernity. They also began to create spatially and ethnically based patterns of inequality. Just as the book historicizes the actions of businessmen and private corporations, it also considers the state to be, in the words of Patrick Joyce, an “assemblage” of tentative “outcomes or achievements” created by the accumulation of historical actions.32 The Communist state enterprise system, for example, was not produced by transplanting to China the institutions and factories of the Soviet Union in the 1950s. Instead, each of the enterprise system’s defining characteristics, including bureaucratic organization, accounting systems, and housing benefits, was added in a different time and under different circumstances. In the end, then, the enterprise system was not the product of a single, unified vision but an assemblage of Chinese and imported practices amassed from the 1860s through the 1950s.33 The institutions of each state, then, are a hodgepodge of accretions accumulated over time. In China, this was particularly true for borderlands regions, where state-led development projects might begin in the late Qing and be restarted by Republican-era provincial governments before being poached by first the Nationalists and finally the Communists. Development projects in Xinjiang were layered in just this way, meaning that beginning with the late Qing, each successive state adopted and modified the investments and institutions of the previous states. The result, argues Judd Kinzley, was “not a unified, centralized program of state building, but rather the accumulation of a disjointed, mish-mash of . . . institutions.”34 State-building and economic development are thus historically contingent processes, spanning the late Qing, Republican, and early Communist periods. By the time the party was assuming control of Yunnan’s state-run and private corporations after 1949—and creating development plans for borderlands minority communities—it was doing so with an assemblage of institutions, ideas, and circumstances that reached back into the late Qing. The important elements of the existing assemblage included both institutions and ideas, including

Introduction 11

a long-standing and powerful vision, dating to 1876, of mechanizing Yunnan’s mining industry. Over time, this vision was passed on to new generations. By the 1930s, it took shape in a number of innovative state-run corporations created to industrialize Yunnan’s mining, textiles, and other industries in order to develop—as many Yunnanese themselves described it—a poor and isolated province that was strategically vulnerable because of its many backward minorities. The Yunnanese tendency to portray the home province in such stark terms was not an accurate reflection of lived reality. As we will see, there were a number of oases of wealth and privilege scattered across a landscape that also saw dire poverty. The wealth was provided by the private corporations, which also connected certain towns to transnational networks of information and mobility. Those who enjoyed such networks included the Tai saophas of western Yunnan, like Fang Kesheng, who were not, in the end, so backward after all. Still, the simple image of backwardness and isolation stuck, and in the 1930s, it influenced how the Yunnanese government created state-run corporations to reverse the province’s fortunes. When the new Communist Party inherited these corporations and ideas, the inheritance would provide the foundations for the party’s construction of an allegedly new China, one in which the term corporate conquests had a double meaning: even as the party conquered private corporations by gaining control over ownership and management, it used corporations to conquer borderlands areas by taking control of their economies and development. In relating this history, the book places the borderlands at the center of analysis. Originating with the work of Herbert E. Bolton (1870–1953), borderlands scholarship initially studied the Spanish Empire in North America, seeking to investigate, notes David Weber, “the interplay of cultures on both sides of the frontier.”35 In other words, Bolton and his students did not conceive of the American West from a narrow eastern and Anglo point of view. Thus, Bolton’s approach has been, in the long run, a fatal challenge to Frederick Jackson Turner’s Anglo-centric definition of the frontier as the “meeting point between savagery and civilization,” just as recent scholarship has challenged the Han-centrism of earlier approaches to (and current government narratives about) China’s diverse West.36 The strength of borderlands methodologies lies in their careful consideration of multiple points of view and their unwillingness to accept national boundaries as obstacles to historical inquiry. This in turn allows us to overcome the pernicious use of frontier history for constructing nationalist ideologies of dominance and inequality.37 Rather than reinforce the story of a nation created by an expanding

12

Introduction

Han people (represented by the party after 1949) who settled, civilized, and modernized the borderlands by gifting development, the book reveals how dynamically modern some parts of the so-called backward borderlands were. In poor, isolated Yunnan, there were merchants who, influenced by developments in colonial Burma, sought to transform their communities with hydroelectric plants, libraries, and education for their daughters. There were Tai saophas who, through their transnational connections, were privy to discussions about autonomy and independence in Burma; they could imagine a world of new political relationships in which borderlands people had a legitimate voice. And in Miao Yuntai, there was an economic planner who drew from his childhood visions of a backward Yunnan as well as experiences in the United States and Shanghai to create state-led, profit-oriented corporations that not only placed Yunnan’s economic organization ahead of national trends but also anticipated some of the post-1979 reforms to China’s economy. Such findings unsettle the typical understandings of the past, including the assumption that the history of China proper can stand in for modern Chinese history as a whole, as it was once common to use the northeastern United States to narrate purportedly American national stories.38 Building from the methodologies espoused by histories of capitalism and the borderlands, we can formulate a broader, more accurate history of China. If, as Louis Hyman argues, we realize that “people on the margins matter,” then it is possible to understand how China’s history, including its history of economic development, need not be written from east to west but might also be written from west to east.39 By incorporating the borderlands into our historical understandings of China as a whole, moreover, historians will better serve the public. As I draft this introduction in 2019, we are watching the Communist Party’s despicable internment of thousands upon thousands of Uyghurs and Kazakhs in Xinjiang, and only a few specialists are able to make sense of this for a public who is largely ignoring this abomination. This led Rian Thum to argue that “any understanding of China is distorted without a consideration of the minorities with which the Han majority is intertwined. Such distortion helps keep the gross injustices in Xinjiang invisible, and risks enabling an even darker future, foreshadowed by the stories of torture and deaths that have already begun to emerge from the internment camps.”40 By making borderlands communities visible and by turning to borderlands’ voices, historians can recapture a past in which alternative futures were possible. Through documents such as Fang Kesheng’s Ideas, we might realize that

Introduction 13

disempowered development was not the only option. To identify alternatives, however, we need to place the borderlands at the center of analysis, leap across the barriers that separate Qing from Republic and Republic from People’s Republic, and focus on unconventional topics, such as the histories of Chinese corporations and their conquest of the Southwest. –•– Our history of corporations begins in Yunnan Province. As will become clear, Yunnan was often described, even by Yunnanese, as a remote, unsophisticated frontier. Although this book demonstrates the limitations of such a narrative, the description has its origins in the province’s rugged topography and the fact that it was not integrated into China until the thirteenth century. The topography and climate of Yunnan range from the snow-capped peaks of the Northwest, where the province bumps up against the Himalayas, to the tropical rain forests of the South, where the traditional valley rice paddies, the hillside swidden fields, and an array of Tai, Mon-Khmer, and Tibeto-Burman dialects reveal the transition to Southeast Asia. Flowing from the Tibetan Plateau across these varied ecosystems are some of Asia’s great rivers, including the Irrawaddy, Mekong, and Yangtze. Largely unnavigable within Yunnan, the rivers carved a rugged landscape of mountains and valleys that made transportation and communication significant logistical challenges for our corporations—but challenges that could be overcome through the organization of mule trains as well as precise practices of record keeping. From the eighth through the thirteenth centuries, much of what is now Yunnan was controlled by regional powers: first the Nanzhao Kingdom and then the Dali Kingdom, which challenged China’s Tang and Song empires.41 Under the Mongol Yuan (1273–1368) and then Ming (1368–1644), Yunnan was developed into a province of the empire, but like other southwestern provinces, many parts of it continued to be ruled by indigenous power holders, the tusi, rather than by imperial bureaucrats. Over the centuries, the Ming and then early Qing regimes carried out wars of conquest against indigenous peoples. But even as the imperial states and settlers from inland China transformed regional politics and demographics, there continued to be vast swaths ruled by indigenous clans, including Fang Kesheng’s aristocratic Tai lineage. These indigenous leaders were considered by the Qing to be part of the imperial bureaucracy, but it is clear from local sources that these rulers relied on regional and transfrontier sources of power that were unrelated to the Qing.42

14

Introduction

By the late Qing, when Yunnanese merchants were establishing powerful corporations, the political and cultural geography of the Southwest continued to be diverse and complex, but like the organization of business, it was on the brink of revolutionary changes. Until the late nineteenth century, the Qing approach to governing diversity was to seek to catalog every group and then create policies appropriate to each community.43 In Yunnan alone, the 1835 provincial gazetteer recorded 142 unique “barbarian” (man or yi) groups, many of them considered quite different culturally from the communities that were increasingly understood to comprise the majority Han population.44 The nineteenthcentury Southwest was, in both the experiences of daily life and the minds of its rulers, a patchwork of diverse communities ruled through a variety of specially tailored institutions. In the 1870s, Qing officials began to think differently about governing diversity. Western and Japanese concepts of sovereignty, race, and nationalism entered Chinese society, and the Qing and its successor states would turn to, as Tom Mullaney has argued, the “reductive mindset” of modern government, in which peoples had to be categorized into numerically limited racial groups so that the state could count them and integrate them into a tightly supervised and more unitary national community.45 From a governing perspective, this entailed frequently violent efforts to eradicate native officials in order to standardize and centralize governance. From an ethnographic point of view, this entailed deploying anthropologists to categorize Yunnan’s peoples into language families (Mon-Khmer, Tai-Shan, and Miao-Yao) in order to consolidate the extraordinary variety of communities into a smaller number of ethnicities (minzu) that could be documented, surveilled, and assimilated. As Mullaney has shown, this approach—in which extreme diversity was no longer tolerated—led to direct rule over borderland provinces.46 By the 1950s, then, the 142 “barbarian” groups recognized in the early nineteenth century were reduced to just twenty-six. Although we can now speak authoritatively of Yunnan as China’s most diverse province because it is home to Bai (Minjia), Tai (Dai), Kachin (Jingpo), Tibetan, and twenty-two other minzu, we must recognize that the official number of twenty-six reflects the imposition of official ethnic categories on a region that historically had more fluid approaches to identity. The trend toward reduction corresponded with a period in which politics was volatile in Yunnan and across China. Beginning in the 1870s, the Qing struggled to recover after decades of foreign attacks and domestic uprisings. In dealing with these crises, the state strengthened governance systems and, as we

Introduction 15

will see, sought to implement direct governance and economic development. In the end, the Qing was unable to recreate itself as a powerful, modern nationstate, and it fell to widespread rebellions in autumn 1911. In its aftermath, a revolutionary Republican government was established, but it quickly disintegrated into a fragmented array of warlord territories, run by men who had access to military power. While these so-called warlords certainly depended on the barrel of the gun for power, they were a diverse lot. Some were little more than bandit lords. Others had enjoyed the advantages of some of the most modern education that early-twentieth-century China had to offer. The Yunnan warlords were cut from this latter mold, and they presided over a provincial government that used modern approaches to control Yunnan’s diverse peoples while also building an industrial economy. Much of this book addresses the Republican period (1912–1949). In Yunnan this was the era of the Yunnan Army and the warlords who controlled it: Cai E (r. 1912–1913), Tang Jiyao (r. 1913–1927), and Long Yun (r. 1927–1950). At first, the warlords of Yunnan were a relatively cohesive bunch whose leaders had studied together in Japan, created the powerful Yunnan Army, and then overthrown the Qing. These military leaders were not only well educated; they had emerged from contexts in which men dreamed forward-looking dreams of a new sort of China, surrounding themselves with educated advisers who wanted to make China modern. Tang Jiyao, for example, had been a good student, and he joined twenty-seven other Yunnanese who were sent to the Japanese Army Officers’ Academy, considered among the world’s finest officer training schools. Far from home and plunged into a new urban environment, some Yunnanese cadets, including Tang, became radical nationalists, placing the abstract but heartfelt concept of nation well above loyalty to the Qing regime. Tang wrote, “I am not my own self, but my country’s. I love what benefits my country and hate what harms it.” Educated in one of the world’s elite military academies and obsessed with changing China, Tang and his fellow officers wanted desperately to overcome the weaknesses that undermined China.47 After Tang and his Yunnan Army comrades seized control of the provincewide rebellion against the Qing, they transformed Yunnan into an independently administered territory, while also extending authority into neighboring provinces.48 In chapter 6, I explore Tang Jiyao’s government in more detail, but it is important to know that in the 1920s, things would unravel. The Yunnanese overextended their powerful army, undercutting its cohesion. The Yunnan Army rapidly devolved into a series of autonomous units commanded by

16

Introduction

generals competing for power.49 One of those competing generals, Long Yun, would be the one to put Yunnan back together again in the late 1920s, and he would enlist the help of the American-educated Miao Yuntai (see figure 2). When Long Yun delegated remarkable economic powers to Miao Yuntai, the central government was weak, and Yunnan had the leeway to manage its own development. This changed in the late 1930s, after the Japanese invasion, when Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalist government retreated inland, bringing central government influence. As we will see, the central government officials worked with Yunnanese to continue building a new type of development state, one that would seek to undermine the power of private corporations and gain control over borderlands communities. It was these processes that would make possible the Communist Party’s approach to centrally controlled state building and Han-centric economic development. The book begins with three chapters on the creation and growth of Yunnanbased private corporations and their impact on merchant communities. Chapter 1 explains how the evolution of these firms relied not on idealized Confucian family values but on corporate governance techniques, including new profit-sharing and bookkeeping practices that allowed Yunnanese to redefine human relationships, conquer distance, and extend their influence throughout Southwest China and into Southeast Asia. Drawing on insights that bookkeeping calculations shape social order, the chapter demonstrates how new record-keeping procedures allowed the growing firms to deemphasize kinship relations, turn intrafirm relations into matters of profit or loss, and centralize power in the general manager’s headquarters.50 This helped the firms to expand over vast distances while maintaining relatively disciplined corporate governance.51 Since businesses are treated here as historical institutions rather than timeless entities based on idealized family values, the chapter demonstrates why successful firms were formed by both Han Chinese and Minjia (a Yunnan minority community), whose kinship practices differed significantly from those of Han families. The Minjia could also build firms using new organizational technologies, and their successes reveal that disempowered development was not inevitable. The successful firms built commercial networks linking Sichuan, Yunnan, and Burma—with later expansion to Kham, Hong Kong, Shanghai, and South Asia. To support these networks, the firms dispatched managers to branch offices, where they might spend years. This strained families because parents

Introduction 17

Yuntai in the University of Minnesota’s Chinese Students Club, 1917. Miao is in the front on the far right. FIGURE 2.   Miao

S ou rc e : Gopher 30 (University of Minnesota, 1917), 429. Image courtesy of the University of Minnesota Archives.

and wives often remained at home even as many men remarried while abroad, creating new families and perhaps never returning. Using local sources, chapter 2 examines how late-nineteenth-century merchant communities adapted to the stresses of modern corporate life by reconfiguring gender and kinship to hold together dispersed, mobile families. Pressure was applied to wives, moreover, to be disciplined household managers, but discipline was difficult because the emerging culture of merchant privilege also brought the desire to generate prestige by consuming conspicuously. In chapter 3, we enter the twentieth century to probe more deeply into how transnational migration to Burma shaped new aspirations, new identities, and new dreams.52 While Yi Li has demonstrated how Yunnanese and other Chinese migrants created a collective Chinese-Burmese identity, this chapter focuses on a different problem: how the experience of migrant life influenced merchants to transform China.53 While their concerns were influenced by the transnational flows of Chinese ideas, the merchants were also shaped by the Yunnanese experience with colonial education and the pressures of assimilation; they wanted their children to study a modern curriculum, but were leery of allowing them, especially girls, to drift away from their Chinese heritage. Thus, they built schools in Mandalay and in their hometowns, where modern curricula and modern Chinese identity were emphasized. In the end, this chapter reveals how activist merchants constructed a particular Yunnanese vision of modernity and were motivated to invest in and transform their hometowns into wealthy, cosmopolitan oases.

18

Introduction

Chapter 4 takes us from the first narrative of private firms to the second narrative of state building and state-run corporations. However, the chapter is not about Yunnan. Instead, it follows the private Yunnan firms into Kham to examine how they came to dominate regional trade, effectively excluding many Khampas from the benefits of commercialization. To understand this history, the corporations are placed within a broader political context, and the chapter reveals how government officials and Han nationalists increasingly depicted borderlands minorities as backward, leading radical officials such as “the butcher” Zhao Erfeng to use international colonialism as a guide to eradicating Khampa leadership in Kham.54 From the early twentieth-century forward, Zhao and his successors would promote private and state-run corporate control over Khampa resources. In contrast to the increasingly wealthy hometowns of Yunnan’s merchants, the Khampa communities experienced the downside of corporate growth: they often were the people who lost control over local resources and local futures. In part II, the book returns to Yunnan to pursue further the origins and evolution of state-run corporations. At the heart of chapters 5 and 6 is an investigation into the mechanization of mining, a difficult process induced by a concatenation of new ideas about state power, natural resources, territory, and ethnic difference. Chapter 5 covers the 1870s through the 1910s, introducing the powerful vision, first articulated in 1876, of mechanizing Yunnan’s mining industry by creating state-led corporations. In the 1880s, when the first modern mining corporation was created, it was part of empire-wide initiatives to industrialize and modernize China, a familiar story.55 In retelling this story from a borderlands perspective, however, the chapter defamiliarizes it by demonstrating how industrialization was influenced by changing ideas about ethnicity, as well as schemes to transform Qing territorial governance from pluralistic practices of empire, in which indigenous elites were legitimate leaders, to the direct rule of the nation-state, where cultural and ethnic difference were no longer tolerated. In these early years, then, the concepts of development came to be linked to hierarchies of ethnic difference. Chapter 6 discusses the 1920s to the 1930s, when Miao Yuntai finally fulfilled the dream of mechanizing mining. Once again, this is a story that has been told before, but the chapter places Miao in a broader context, arguing that he was much more than an opportunistic modernizer, as John Hall has suggested.56 A Yunnanese and a graduate of an American university who had worked in New York City and Shanghai, Miao sought to translate the efficiencies of the large,

Introduction 19

centralized, and professionally managed American corporations to Yunnan, which he understood as poor, isolated, and therefore in need of governmentled development. Miao emphasized that the provincial government should build corporations that were entrepreneurial, subject to market pressures, and controlled by the state as majority shareholder. Thus, Miao’s accomplishments put him both ahead of and at odds with the Nationalist government’s bureaucratic approach to managing state enterprises.57 Miao also anticipated, and may even have influenced, changes to post-Mao Chinese industry. The final chapter examines the wartime and civil war periods (1937–1949), and it brings together the book’s major stories about private corporations, state-run corporations, and the development of borderlands regions. After the Japanese invasion, it was Miao and the Yunnan provincial government that first harnessed private Yunnanese firms for the wartime effort. After the arrival of the National government in the Southwest, the provincial economic and corporate institutions would be joined by central institutions in a complex assemblage. These efforts were part of broader development plans that sought to impose state power over private firms and over borderlands’ resources and communities. Against this growing threat of disempowered development stood Fang Kesheng and other worldly Tai saophas. In hindsight, we can see how these earlier developments would, when layered into the assemblage that became the People’s Republic, produce a country where disempowered development was all but inevitable, but in the 1950s, there were still alternatives. The Epilogue is based in part on party histories and documents, and it returns to many of our protagonists in order to explain why alternative paths were not taken. In the process, we learn about the end of the Tai saophas and the private Yunnanese firms. In 1953, the saophas would gain “autonomy” (zizhi) as they had hoped, only to discover that there is an intense cruelty to party-speak because it promises so much and delivers so little. From 1954 to 1956, the Yunnan private corporations would become permanent parts of the state assemblage as they first contributed to economic recovery only to succumb to state takeovers after the new government closed markets and undermined the autonomy of private capital. The state-run firms that Miao Yuntai built, meanwhile, would become the foundations of Yunnan’s planned economy—the foundation of the province’s allegedly new era that had been poured in the old era. Of our human protagonists who lived into this period, there were two futures available: flee into exile, as Fang Kesheng and Miao Yuntai did, or join the new regime, only to

20

Introduction

be irrevocably damaged in the party-led violence of the 1950s and 1960s. For those purged, redemption finally came after Mao died in 1976, but this proved much too late for some. Of all the protagonists, perhaps Yuntai fared the best: he would return from exile years later to witness his ideas about corporate governance in state-run enterprises taking hold in the era of reform and opening.

1

The Muleteers

Our Tengchong! Eight or nine of every ten men leave home to make a living. —Lament of an unknown author, Qingnian baojian, ca. 1870

near Tengchong in westernmost Yunnan, the road’s cobbles have settled in the dry, red earth. This narrow stone road makes for a dusty, uneven path leading out of town (see figure 3). In imperial times, thousands of village men and their pack animals traveled along it, intent, so it is said, on providing for the family by leaving the family behind. Though this cobble road appears a humble path, it supported a major commercial transition that transformed this village and others like it during the nineteenth century. Over these cobbles clopped horses and mules, their bells clanking and their flags flying, packing commodities that would make and lose fortunes. With their clappy bells and their colorful flags, the mule trains—some of them hundreds of animals long—must have been a spectacle (see figure 4). And the smell! But it was not the trains themselves that would change society, for they were not new. Muleteers and their animals had been traversing Yunnan and the Southwest for centuries, albeit not with nearly the same frequency of the nineteenth-century trains. It was not the trade or the trains that were new; it was a revolution in business organization, and this revolution was embodied by the Yunnanese-owned trading firm, many formed as shareholding partnerships. As the nineteenth century turned into the twentieth, some Yunnan communities produced dozens of trading firms (shanghao), meaning that the number of traders and the volume of trade substantially increased. It was these businesses that organized or hired the ever-increasing pack trains. The explosion of new businesses drove a process of commercialization that remade merchants’ home villages both materially and culturally. To understand OUTSIDE HESHUN VILLAGE,

23

24

From Muleteers to Millionaires

FIGURE 3.   The

old cobbled road from Heshun to Burma.

S ou rc e : Photograph by the author.

borderlands history, then, is to understand how the rapid commercial growth in the eighteenth century was followed by a continued growth of commerce driven by new business institutions and the domination of key trade towns by merchants, many of whom were Yunnanese and many of whom were, probably unintentionally, changing their world forever. The towns that produced the best-documented and most numerous firms were Heshun and its larger neighbor, Tengchong, both dusty frontier towns. To the north, near Dali, the merchants of Heqing and Xizhou also built powerful companies. By studying these places, we begin to understand how the Yunnan



FIGURE 4.   A

The Muleteers

25

Yunnan mule and pony train all loaded up, 1922.

S ou rc e : Image courtesy of the Arnold Arboretum Horticultural Library Archives. Photo by J. F. Rock March 10, 1922, Eastern Asian Historical Photography Collections, © President and Fellows of Harvard College, Arnold Arboretum Library. Reprinted with permission.

of the nineteenth century was not simply a peripheral region where Qing officials and immigrant merchants presided over a copper mining industry in decline. Nor was it a place where foreign imperialists alone drove momentous economic changes by importing their yarns and textiles. Instead, we learn that change might come from the innovations of local villagers too. What is exciting about this period is that the men and women who grew up in the handful of generations born from the 1750s through the 1870s faced a world different from that of their forebears. They grew up and grew old in a Southwest no longer defined by sparse and isolated communities. Theirs was a society that was economically vibrant, increasingly linked by trade networks. They witnessed local muleteers build the business firms that created change, and they were among the villagers forced to adjust. For Yunnanese, trade was at the heart of change, sparking new ways to understand and organize their lives. They developed shareholding businesses and, along the way, figured out how to manage employees, goods, and finances. To do so, they adopted methods to train apprentices, articulate their firms’ goals, and record in ledgers their capital, expenses, debt, and profit. These methods

26

From Muleteers to Millionaires

included accounting and would help business owners conquer space and human nature, helping them align their employees’ incentives with those of ownership. This would, in turn, help them deploy representatives across the vast distances and ruggedness of the Southwest and beyond—to Mandalay, Rangoon, Kham, and, eventually, Hong Kong, Lhasa, and even India’s Kolkatta and Kalimpong. While scholars have noted how accounting allowed states to turn territory into governable space, it is also the case that accounting technologies allowed private firms to overcome distance in their efforts to turn commodities into profit.1 For those who were successful, the rewards were extraordinary wealth and some political influence, but the road to success was as uncertain and uneven as the stone paths leading from Heshun. –•– After he became a wealthy man, Yan Zizhen was said to still enjoy hanging around with the muleteers, pouring them tea and offering cigarettes to the foremen (maguotou). He claimed that the muleteers “are the parents who provide us with food and clothing,” and he is said to never have felt as close to the truck drivers who took over routes in later years.2 Perhaps this was because Yan himself began as a lowly itinerant trader with a single donkey. He was a muleteer without a mule and a boy without a father. Yan was born in Xizhou town, and his biological father died before his birth. His mother remarried, but the stepfather never took to Yan. As a result, the boy had struck out on his own at the tender age of thirteen. He borrowed ten ounces of silver from a maternal relative, purchased a donkey, and began trudging from village market to village market, selling the tough, indigo-dyed local cloth. As his income increased, Yan bought a mule and horse, and he began to lead them over a hundred-mile journey southwestward to Baoshan, where he could buy imported machine-spun yarns from the Heshun and Tengchong merchants, who worked the routes to Mandalay. These yarns he then brought to Sichuan’s Huili town, where he could sell them and purchase Sichuanese silk, which was in demand by the Heshun and Tengchong firms that exported it to Burma. In his travels to Sichuan, Yan met the man who would become one of his two managing partners in the famous Yongchangxiang firm. This partner was Peng Yongchang, who sold porcelains from his native Jiangxi Province in Huili and in the vibrant river port of Xufu (Yibin). The two would partner with a third trader, Yang Hongchun, a persnickety man who hailed from a village north of Xizhou and did most of his trading from the Dali area north to Lijiang.



The Muleteers

27

Yang’s expertise lay in brick tea—tea leaves that were compressed into bricks for export to Tibet via Lijiang—and traditional medicines such as caterpillar fungus (chongcao) and musk, which were imported from Kham.3 The most successful Yunnan partnerships experienced periods of explosive growth as well as decades of longevity, surviving even the difficult wartime years of 1937 to 1945. Yongchangxiang would epitomize this extraordinary growth. Started in 1903 by the three managing partners and two equity investors, Yongchangxiang began as a simple shareholding trading firm, with approximately 11,000 taels (ounces of silver) in share capital. While they could not mobilize a great deal of capital, Yan, Peng, and Yang brought a diverse set of experiences to the partnership. Together, they had experience in a number of important regional trading centers, as well as in the most widely traded commodities, and their combined expertise laid the foundation for a trading firm that could link the silk-producing regions of Sichuan to colonial Burma, with its access to Indian and European imports, and the highlands of the Tibetan Plateau, with its valuable animal, plant, and mineral resources. Though Peng and Yang would cash out, Yongchangxiang continued to grow and diversify over the years, and by the early 1950s, the firm controlled an estimated 110 billion renminbi in fixed and liquid assets distributed among its import-export businesses, its stake in silk-reeling workshops, and its investment in tin mines and refineries. The firm came to support a workforce of approximately three thousand scattered from Sichuan to Shanghai to Hong Kong, India, and Burma.4 Yongchangxiang had made Yan Zizhen, the former muleteer, into a millionaire and an influential man in western Yunnan. How did three itinerant merchants build a transnational firm of such magnitude? And what were the consequences? The answers lie not only in the history of Yongchangxiang alone, but in the history of the broader region. When Yan Zizhen started his itinerant cloth business in the late nineteenth century, he did so in a province that since the early eighteenth century had experienced remarkable demographic and commercial change. While commercial growth was not continuous—it was interrupted by the massive Panthay Rebellion (1855–1873)—Yan was embarking on a trading career in a society where commerce and money had transformed everyday life as well as local knowledge. In comparison to their ancestors, Yunnanese like Yan had access to more sophisticated business practices that, when skillfully deployed, allowed them to bring together diverse partners, some of whom, like Peng Yongchang, might not be Yunnanese, and extend their organizational reach across great distances. The

28

From Muleteers to Millionaires

Yunnanese adopted those sophisticated business practices in response to the tremendous changes of the eighteenth century. In the eighteenth century, southwestern society began a period of unprecedented commercial growth. This is not to say that trade was brand new. Before there was a Southwest China, in fact, local and long-distance trade networks had crisscrossed the lands now known as Yunnan, Sichuan, and Guizhou provinces. The earliest exchanges date to periods before the Common Era, though more significant trade occurred in the tenth through thirteenth centuries. By the fifteenth century, the Tengchong region was a site for the imperial state to acquire jade, silver, and gems.5 In terms of organization and volume, however, these earlier periods of trade simply do not compare to the eighteenth century. Up through the sixteenth century, the state, not private merchants, dominated the trade and transport of goods. The range of goods, moreover, was relatively narrow, restricted primarily to luxury items, silver, and horses. Whether it was the Song regime (960– 1279) trading for Yunnan horses and promoting Sichuan salt production or the Ming court (1368–1644) stationing imperial commissioners at key economic centers and claiming silver mines as state property, the imperial governments ran or promoted many important exchanges.6 The first signs of change came in the sixteenth century, when the Ming state began to withdraw from direct involvement in the gem trade and silver mining. This bolstered local markets as private traders emerged and trade grew in the early seventeenth century.7 Still, overall trade volumes remained small, and merchant manuals portrayed the Southwest as a commercial wasteland.8 Transformative change came in the eighteenth century, and it started with state investment in roads, which decreased transport costs and increased merchant traffic.9 In eastern Yunnan, for example, grain transport costs decreased by 50 percent over the two centuries from 1620 to 1818, and by 1800, horse transport may have cost one-third of what it had in 1700. It was now possible to transport basic necessities in bulk, and Yunnanese came to rely more on marketing and trade. Based on demographic data and statistics for salt and grain production, James Lee estimates that Qing Yunnan had higher trade volumes per capita than the empire’s average. His price data, moreover, suggest the beginnings of an integrated Southwest market.10 In short, from 1600 to 1800, there was a dramatic uptick in southwestern commerce, particularly in Yunnan. The radical expansion of trade came to include bulk commodities such as grain and



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cotton, not just the luxuries of earlier eras. It may be hard to envision, but the Southwest—and particularly Yunnan—was remarkably commercialized, even if it was also quite poor. It is hard to envision because it runs counter to the region’s stereotype as backward and its indigenous inhabitants’ reputation as poorly prepared for commerce. The eighteenth-century commercial explosion had several causes. The Qing state was extraordinarily active, overseeing the vast copper mining industry as well as managing large grain shipments to stabilize food markets. James Lee argues that these interventions prove that the state was responsible for the Southwest’s commercialization.11 And it is true that state activity, particularly military activity, stimulated commerce.12 Without denying the state’s role, though, we should also note how private merchant activity increased to unprecedented levels. Even at the peak of the Qing copper transport system, when the state shipped 4,000 tons of Yunnan copper per year to the Beijing mints, private trade was even greater in volume. Along northeast Yunnan’s major copper transport route, Nanny Kim estimates that imperial pack trains annually carried up to 25,000 mule loads of copper and zinc. At the same time, however, private pack trains carried about 15,000 to 30,000 loads of herbal medicines, which was only one of many high-volume privately traded commodities. Kim concludes that state-run trade, although significant, was lower in volume than private trade.13 Private merchants responded to the growing needs of migrant miners, soldiers, and farmers to provide basic goods for Yunnan’s growing population. One of the largest trades existed in raw cotton, much of which was imported from the Burmese kingdom. While the large-scale importing of raw cotton began in the eighteenth century, it reached new heights in the second quarter of the nineteenth century, when private traders imported an estimated 14 million to 21 million pounds per year.14 The literature stresses that these private traders were from outside the region; nevertheless, they were also Yunnan merchants who were developing more sophisticated business firms. The origin of identifiable, durable Yunnanese firms is difficult to date. Some scholars date their emergence to the Qianlong era (1736–1795), but the evidence is scarce.15 While we know that private trade increased at that time, it is not possible to link this with the creation of relatively permanent, identifiable Yunnan firms. It is also difficult to imagine durable firms emerging in the eighteenth century, because, in later times, these firms would thrive in important trade towns such as Dali, where, in the eighteenth century, there were not yet many

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From Muleteers to Millionaires

permanent shops or sources of commercial capital.16 It seems more likely that most Yunnanese traders worked on a seasonal basis using whatever financial resources were locally available. This understanding was remembered in Heshun’s prose poem, Yangwendun xiaoyin, which was used in the later nineteenth century to instruct young people in the ways of business and personal conduct. Before 1800, then, large numbers of Yunnan men took to the pack trails of the Southwest and Southeast Asia.17 Nevertheless, it seems that permanent, largescale Yunnanese-led firms did not emerge until the nineteenth century. In the decades between 1800 and 1850, we have better evidence for the founding of relatively durable, institutionalized Yunnan firms. Luo Qun’s authoritative account lists the Dali-based Sanyuanhao as the earliest, established by Yang Shiyuan in the Jiaqing period (1796–1820). With branches in key trade towns, Sanyuanhao coordinated the distribution of raw cotton throughout western Yunnan. In 1821, Zha Taiyu established Yuhehao to orchestrate trade in raw cotton, yarn, salt, and tea, which was shipped from Yunnan to Tibet. Zha headquartered Yuhehao in Xiaguan (near Dali), establishing the town as a center for brick tea processing and packaging, and then he opened branch offices in other parts of Yunnan. By the Daoguang reign (1821–1850) at the latest, we have evidence that Heshun men were taking advantage of their proximity to Burma and establishing durable firms that traded transborder products such as cotton, jade, gems, and silk. Li Yongmao set up Yongmaohe to trade in gems, jade, and sundries. And Li Mao, Li Maolin, and Lin Zixin established the Sanchenghao partnership; they too handled gems and jade, but also branched out into silk, which they purchased from Sichuan and exported to Burma.18 Cotton, jade, gems, and silk were all commodities that linked China and Burma, and as identifiable Yunnanese firms engaged in these trades, the Yunnan community in Burma grew.19 By the 1830s, there were numerous Yunnan firms active in Mandalay, as demonstrated by the subscription list for the rebuilding of the local Guanyin temple in 1838.20 In these earlier eras, it is difficult to find any direct evidence for the organization and operations of Yunnanese firms in Burma, but agents of the increasingly aggressive British Empire found a wellorganized and adaptable merchant community in the Mandalay region. From Henry Yule’s account of his 1855 mission to the Burmese court, we know that the Yunnanese population of the region was large and organized hierarchically by firm and merchant association.21 We also know that they responded rapidly to new opportunities. Once a British resident was established in Mandalay and



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transport to Rangoon became more reliable in 1862, Yunnanese merchants immediately sought to export opium via the Irrawaddy River and Rangoon port.22 And once the Irrawaddy Flotilla Company opened for business in 1865, Yunnan firms loaded their cotton purchases onto steamers—rather than mules— for the trip up to Bhamo. Reports on shipping from the British political agents, moreover, suggest that the Yunnanese firms paid much of the northbound cargo, and one wonders if this helped make the British-owned steamer company a viable proposition.23 While British accounts rarely focused on the Chinese community in Upper Burma, they mention pieces of information that allow glimpses of Yunnanese embeddedness in the towns and villages. In 1877, British accounts mention Li Ganshen, who sought reimbursement for service to the crown. Originally from Yiluo village, near Tengchong, Li knew Yunnan and Burma quite well. He had grown to adulthood in Yiluo before taking refuge in Burma during the Panthay Rebellion. In Burma, Li had learned the Burmese language and worked in the colonial courts; he also took a Burmese name, Moung Yo, and became a British subject.24 Li’s service to the colonial courts reveals something never stated outright in the British records: as they extended their influence into Upper Burma, the British relied on Yunnanese. In October 1877, for example, the Bhamo political agent reported that he had permitted Yunnanese jugglers to perform in town, lest he irritate the local Yunnanese elite; a crowd of 350 turned out for the show.25 The next month, the Yunnanese headman in Bhamo received an update from a British officer, Lieutenant Gill, who at the time was hundreds of miles away in Qing-controlled Kham. The headman passed the communication on to the Bhamo political agent, who then updated the Indian government.26 That the headman received the update before the British political agent did reveals the superior quality of Yunnanese communication networks. During these earlier decades of British influence in Upper Burma, the crown officers often relied on Yunnanese for information, translation, transport, and money. Even as late as 1915, when the British had a consulate in Tengchong, the consuls employed the Tengchong firm of Chunyanji to handle their finances.27 If the British encounters with Yunnanese provide some sense of the growing importance of transborder Yunnan migrants and their businesses, then we must try to understand what made these firms work. One reason for the growing number of Yunnan firms was the diffusion of business knowledge. By the time Yunnanese were forming their firms, Chinese entrepreneurs had access to multiple business strategies. They might individually finance

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and run their own firms, they might turn to kin or lineage trusts for finance, or they might form partnerships through the sale of shares. Partners might manage their own firms, leave management to other partners, or hire professional managers. Firms might also evolve over time—for example, tightly held family firms might change course and seek commercial capital and outside partners. There is even evidence that late imperial Chinese were capable of forming complex, multidivisional firms resembling the transformational nineteenth-century American industrial companies.28 In other words, scholars such as Madeleine Zelin have demonstrated that Chinese business traditions were flexible and diverse, not limited to the stereotypical kin-based and network-based models that have often been mistakenly projected onto the Chinese past and present.29 Because there were choices for business organization, it is important to realize that Yunnanese often formed shareholding partnerships, including with non-kin, a pattern found in other parts of the Southwest and one particularly well adapted to the nature of Han and Minjia communities in Yunnan. The trade firm Fuchunheng, for example, is often linked to the Jiang family of Heqing, implying that it was a stereotypical Chinese family firm. But the firm was headquartered nowhere near Heqing, and two-thirds of the founding partners were not Jiangs. Instead, Fuchunheng was founded in 1876 by Jiang Zonghan, who did hail from Heqing, and two partners from Tengchong, the merchants Ming Shugong and Dong Yisan.30 At some point, Ming and Dong were bought out, but this was not the end of the firm as a partnership. Jiang sought other partners, eventually merging with another firm, Fuqingren, and hiring a series of professional general managers (zhanggui). A successful firm, Fuchunheng was largely a shareholding partnership through much of its existence. This was not true of Yongmaohe, which was founded circa 1850.31 It began as a single-proprietor shop in Burma’s ruby-mining area of Mogok. By 1893, the founder, Li Yongmao, had amassed enough rupees to retire home to Heshun, and he left the store to his son, Li Dexian. Dexian did not want to run a shop in a rough, mining backwater. He had larger ambitions. So he expanded the business, getting involved in trade to Mandalay, which required more capital. Thus, in 1897, Li Dexian brought a partner into the business and later registered for limited liability status under British colonial law. In 1927, when the next generation of Lis, Li Jingtian and his brother, climbed the company ladder to run the firm, they expanded the business even more, from Yunnan and Burma to Shanghai. In his memoir, Jingtian notes that the firm often sought capital from



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outside investors and even merged with another firm at one point, demonstrating a flexible approach to business strategy. This early history of Yunnan firms is important because some of the most successful twentieth-century firms changed strategies over time, although the partnership model was at the foundation of their organization. This was true of the trading giant Maoheng, which developed into a shareholding firm with twenty to thirty or more investors, and the firm, in turn, invested in dozens of other enterprises, such as the Yunnan Transportation Company, Zhengyi Pharmaceuticals, China Match, and Yun Mao Textile Factory.32 It was also true of Maoheng’s largest competitor and sometime partner, Yongchangxiang. Yongchangxiang’s growth over the years revealed a flexibility that was embedded in the partnership model that defined it from the beginning. Each partner came from a modest trading background, and Yan Zizhen himself had acted as his own muleteer, driving his animals hundreds of miles through Yunnan. Each partner brought specific skills and market knowledge: Yang Hongchun knew the markets of Lijiang, where traditional Tibetan Plateau medicines could be procured and southern Yunnan tea sold to Tibetans; Peng Yongchang had traded in Sichuan’s cloth markets; and Yan had experience trading along the Burma route, down as far as Tengchong. Over the long run, Yan’s Tengchong connections and Peng’s Sichuan connections would bring tremendous benefits. This combined knowledge was one reason the firm could link Sichuan to Burma in the lucrative silk and cotton trades. Over the firm’s first fourteen years, it grew rapidly, as revealed by Yan Zizhen’s third son, Yang Kecheng, who reconstructed the firm’s growth from the ledgers. From 1903 to 1916, operating capital grew from just over 11,000 taels to 45,030 taels. 33 From the beginning, the shareholders were reinvesting profit in the firm, even as managing and equity partners earned dividends based on their capital contributions and work for the firm. The growth of Yongchangxiang reconfirms Zelin’s findings that Chinese shareholders reinvested in their firms.34 In later years, that practice would be intensified and lead Yongchangxiang to extraordinary growth. By 1942, for example, capital totaled more than 2 billion yuan.35 Although Yongchangxiang was a profitable and growing business, the initial managing partnership did not survive. The frugal Yang withdrew in 1913, reportedly vexed by Yan Zizhen’s spendthrift ways. (It was said that Yan spent liberally on medicines and houses.36) Peng held on longer, but by 1919, he too had divested. Over time, new partners, including Zizhen’s sons, bought into the firm, and the number of shareholders gradually increased. Most shareholders,

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it is agreed, were Zizhen’s relatives or men who had come through the firm’s apprentice program, and their connection to the firm was spelled out through their individual investments, recorded in the central office’s ledgers. For Yang Kecheng, Peng’s and Yang’s resignations represented a transformation in which his father gained control over the firm, an interpretation that has been frequently repeated as evidence to back the concept of Yongchangxiang as a lineage-based or family firm.37 But this interpretation relies on older, stereotyped visions of Chinese businesses rather than a careful understanding of both the local Minjia (Bai) culture of Xizhou, where the Yans resided, and the business practices of Yunnan. To reconstruct the history of Yunnan businesses in Xizhou requires an excursion into the worlds of ethnicity, culture, and institutional practice. To understand the link between local family customs, ethnicity, and shareholding in Xizhou and elsewhere in Yunnan, it is necessary to unlearn much that is taken for granted. Chinese scholars of Yunnan business history, for instance, identify the Yans and other Xizhou merchants as ethnic Bai (Baizu), and they tend to argue, without evidence or explanation, that this ethnic background influenced business practices. At the same time, they also argue that Xizhou merchants absorbed Han Chinese Confucian culture, including the emphasis on lineage formation, and that these tightly organized lineage institutions provided the foundation on which firms like Yongchangxiang were constructed.38 As Zhou Zhisheng has argued, the merchants of Xizhou and their business techniques “cannot be separated from a deep nurturing in the details of Han culture.”39 These arguments are at once insightful as well as contradictory. What is inaccurate about these arguments is neither the emphasis on ethnic difference nor the assumption that Xizhou merchants were influenced by Han familial and business culture. The inaccuracies lie first in the assumptions made about what constitutes Han culture and, second, in the ahistorical analysis of how difference and acculturation influenced Xizhou merchant families, a topic that has attracted much attention over the years.40 Many, like Zhou, fall back on easy stereotypes about Chinese family firms and the role of culture in dictating behavior. The belief is that timeless Chinese characteristics, especially the multigenerational, hierarchical, and patriarchal Chinese lineage, are at work in every generation and every location, shaping the outcome of Chinese institutions such as business firms. In this vision, firms rely on rigid, collectivist family values and hierarchies to mobilize individuals to work for the greater good of the lineage firm. At their most egregious, these approaches project a timeless Confucian culture of trust and loyalty as the sole foundation of a distinct



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business culture that still makes family-based Chinese firms impenetrable to outsiders.41 In arguing for the static cultural origins of successful economic behavior, these scholars reduced a complex, diverse Chinese past into a narrative about hard-working, family-oriented, closed-network-forming Confucians. For historians and most sociologists, the reductive nature of this analysis is confounding, but the fact that it is still being peddled in mainstream journals reveals the tenacity of such ideas.42 In order to better understand Chinese business, we need to discard generalizations and focus on the specific conditions of time and place.43 When it comes to Xizhou merchants in the early twentieth century, both Chen and Zhou emphasize culture and ethnicity, noting that the major firms, including Yongchangxiang, were lineage-based businesses run by members of the Bai ethnicity. Unfortunately for their argument, neither the concept of lineage nor the category of Bai, as Zhou and Chen understand it, applied to contemporary Xizhou. The concept of Bai as an official and rigid ethnicity category (minzu), which is how these scholars understand it, did not become salient until after the Nationalities Classification Project in the 1950s. Before that time, there was more fluidity to identities. As David Wu argues, some Xizhou residents considered themselves Han and projected a Han identity by imitating lineage rituals and organization.44 However, we must be careful in assuming, as Wu, Chen, and Zhou do, that categories of identification and cultural practice could so easily be adopted and discarded. It is true that some Xizhou residents of the 1940s strongly asserted a Han identity, though this is also true of many other southwestern communities that were trying to cope with the rise of chauvinistic Han ethnic nationalism. Like other elites throughout Yunnan, the Yans and fellow Xizhou merchant families developed elaborate, invented genealogies and traced their ancestors to Henan Province or Nanjing.45 These genealogies were made concrete through the erection of lineage halls and the development of lineage rituals. From the outside, it looked as if Xizhou elites—especially the merchants—were assimilating, or had already assimilated, to Han ways. But these claims to Han identity do not mean that Xizhou residents could easily, or wanted to easily, shed all markers of Minjia identity. Many Xizhou residents continued to be set apart from Yunnanese Han because their language and family practices diverged in important ways. In his study of the Dali region, C. P. Fitzgerald noted the importance of language to identity: if a person was one of the “speakers of [Bai]” (Shua Bër Ni is how Fitzgerald transliterated it),

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From Muleteers to Millionaires

then he or she was Minjia. Language could help define identity, which was well known and understood by residents of the Dali region.46 To overcome the language barrier between Minjia and Han, then, one had to transform one’s native tongue, and some Xizhou merchants tried to do just that. In her fieldwork in Xizhou, Beth Notar learned that boys might be coached to avoid Bai language, and one of her host fathers, a man who had grown up in a merchant family in the 1940s, had been compelled by his father to avoid speaking Bai. The father’s goal was to open up a future in commerce for his son.47 Difference, then, could reside in language, and it took work to overcome. Difference could also reside in marital and family practices. Despite the invention of Han-style lineages in Xizhou, Francis Hsu found in his 1940s fieldwork that family formation continued to differentiate Xizhou locals from Yunnanese Han. Matrilocal forms of marriage, for example, were remarkably high in Xizhou.48 Family property division also occurred remarkably early. The usual timing was just as the oldest son was married. In contrast to other regions, Xizhou locals considered family division easy and natural, but this worked to undermine the formation of a powerful multigenerational lineage in which property was collectively owned and managed. Hsu concluded that family organization was flexible, as the practices of matrilocal marriage, adoption (as Yan Zizhen was adopted by his stepfather), and early division of family property meant that Xizhou families were rarely tied together through rigid lineage organization, and lineage formation was unusual.49 Xizhou merchants did, however, create the illusion that they were part of durable, extended lineages from East China. They built ancestral temples and held annual collective rituals meant to simulate those of powerful Han lineages. But the Xizhou extended lineages lacked historical depth and organizational strength. There were no powerful lineage councils or extensive corporate land holdings that bound them together as political and economic entities. As Hsu noted, “[Xizhou] clans closely resemble [Xizhou] households . . . they lack inner solidarity.”50 More recently, older Xizhou residents have confirmed to me that local practice has long been early division of the household. No one could imagine the lineage as an institution that did more than hold a few fields in common to help pay for annual temple sacrifices. As in other Minjia areas during the early twentieth century, Xizhou was a place with early family division, weak lineage organization, and high rates of matrilocal marriage. In other words, the region’s culture of family organization resembled other local Minjia practices.51 It is quite likely, then, that Xizhou



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merchants adopted Chinese language and created a facade of lineage organization in order to claim elite status as Han, an attempt at passing that has precedents elsewhere in China’s southern borderlands.52 What these findings suggest, then, is that local patterns of family and lineage formation were particular and did not provide a strong set of institutions that might raise collective capital and manage it through the extended, multigenerational lineage, as was possible elsewhere in China.53 In Sichuan, for example, some lineages developed trusts (tang), which were recognized by Qing law as corporate property-owning entities, and transformed them into management institutions to run and grow vertically integrated businesses. In these cases, the lineage trust was dependent on powerful lineages rules and corporate landowning in order to act as the headquarters for a lineage corporation.54 In Xizhou, because local customs did not produce powerful corporate lineages, the Minjia merchants such as Yan Zizhen may have adopted the lineage as a show of assimilation, but their business practices were built more firmly on the partnership model.55 What emerges from this discussion is that there were multiple ways to form powerful businesses; one did not need to have powerful family or lineage institutions. Nor did one need any “deep nurturing” from Han culture.56 What one needed was access to the technologies of business management and record keeping. The fissiparity of the family in Xizhou made the shareholding partnership the most logical choice for new firms such as Yongchangxiang, and it allowed shareholders to be kin or non-kin. Peng Yongchang, after all, was a Han from Jiangxi. And even when Zizhen’s sons bought into the company, they did so as independent shareholders, for they too followed Xizhou’s tradition of early household partition. The evidence for such an interpretation not only comes from shareholder lists, but also from a trip around Xizhou. Just off the main square lies the original Yan courtyard mansion, built by Zizhen (see figure 5). It still boasts vestiges of the elegant and palatial “carved beams and painted columns” that so impressed the author Lao She when he visited Xizhou.57 In the southern courtyard lies an unexpected structure: a three-story building designed to imitate a European villa. Although Zizhen lived here, his son and fellow shareholder Baocheng did not; Baocheng’s expansive courtyard house lies across an open expanse that formerly served as a market. When I last visited, it seemed to be slated to be a parking area for tourist buses. To my eye, it seemed that Baocheng had built a house on a grander scale than his father, and his yanglou (European villa) is particularly elegant (see figure 6). Was the son trying to outdo the father? Probably, but what is important is the evidence

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From Muleteers to Millionaires

FIGURE 5.   The

elegant entrance to Yan Zizhen's European-style villa.

S ou rc e: Photograph by the author.

for household division. Zizhen’s sons owned property, and each invested in Yongchangxiang as an independent property holder, not as members of a lineage or extended family. The partnership model was crucial to Yongchangxiang’s growth throughout the firm’s life, as it would be for Maoheng and other Han-managed firms too. Like other Yunnan firms, Yongchangxiang continued to have a range of investors, and the basic partnership and shareholding model proved extraordinarily expandable. The most successful Yunnan firms not only attracted investments from an increasing range of shareholders, but the firms themselves also became investors in new enterprises—major silk trading partnerships, Western medicine shops, modern textile factories, railroads, and other enterprises.58 In other words, the basic partnership organization proved adaptable, even as some firms



FIGURE 6.   Yan

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Baocheng’s European villa.

S ou rc e : Photograph by the author.

chose to incorporate, whether under Chinese law like Maoheng59 or under British colonial law like Yongmaohe. The particular share system that Yongchangxiang and other Yunnan firms used also facilitated their geographical expansion. Yunnan firms transported goods over long distances, and at first they did so with few modern technologies. To cope with distance, they created branch offices and dispatched managers to them. Although initially based near Dali, Yongchangxiang had to handle its growing silk and cotton businesses, and, early on, it developed permanent branches in Sichuan, where the silk was purchased, and Mandalay, where silk was sold and cotton purchased. The first permanent branch outside the greater Dali area was located in Xufu (Yibin), Peng Yongchang’s sales territory. It was set up about 1911. A few years later, around 1916, Yan Zizhen leaned on his long-standing connections with Tengchong merchants to set up a permanent branch in Mandalay. He dispatched his nephews Yan Hecheng and Yan Mingcheng to run it.60 The challenge for Yan Zizhen and the other shareholders, however, was how to align branch manager incentives with ownership’s goals. How could a firm prevent graft or sloth by distant branch managers? Surely kinship itself was

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From Muleteers to Millionaires

not enough to bind far-flung managers in loyalty to the home office? These are important questions for any business, and they are widely understood as the agency problem or the question of how to align management actions with ownership’s best interests. Firms sought to provide incentives for employees to behave in ways that benefited shareholders. For insight from management’s point of view, Li Jingtian provides a firsthand account. Though Li ran Yongmaohe, not Yongchangxiang, his account helps illuminate some practices that were shared across many Yunnanese businesses, whether run by Minjia, Han, or Hui. Li was born in Heshun in 1904. At the age of fourteen, his father ordered him to Mandalay to study Burmese language for a year, and then, in 1918, Li headed for Rangoon to study English at the Huaqiao Middle School. By the early 1920s, Li was back in Mandalay ready to learn how to run Yongmaohe. Traveling frequently throughout Burma, he worked his way up the Yongmaohe hierarchy, taking over the firm’s leadership in 1927.61 Kinship was obviously a factor in the firm. After all, Li and his brother took over the management of the firm from their father. However, familial relations were not the only criteria for promoting and rewarding employees. In fact, Li Jingtian argued that in personnel matters, the policy was to “treat equally relatives and non-relatives alike and to simply promote based on ability.”62 In recalling how his firm operated, Li emphasized that unbiased evaluation was central. Unbiased evaluation was stressed at other firms too. The Yongchangxiang founding partners were not related, and, in terms of profit sharing and promotion, they also emphasized performance over kinship. Their partnership agreement stated that no matter who it is or [where] they are in charge, they are judged based on how they handle things throughout the year. At the end of the year, when accounts are squared, we distinguish between profit and loss. As for close kin and blood relatives, [our] affection [toward them] must not be considered. Either there is growth or losses . . . and it is this that determines whether one’s shares increase or decrease.63

The Yongchangxiang company regulations were even clearer than this early contract: “For those who, in the course of their management, create notable profits,” it told its employees, “you will receive a share of the profits as a reward.”64 While it was one thing to claim such a standard, it was another to actually implement it. To do so, many Yunnan firms linked their performance



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evaluations to profit sharing. Employees without an equity stake might earn “performance shares” (ligu, later called chenggu). One of the best explanations of performance shares comes from Shi Cilu, who worked at the Heqing-based firm of Fuchunheng.65 According to Shi, the firm evaluated employees every third year, and a positive evaluation resulted in profit sharing. The firm set aside profits to be distributed to those holding equity shares (bengu) and to those who earned performance shares. Thus, when accounts were squared, profits were shared among both groups. Shi argued that this system allowed workers and shareholders alike to embrace the Fuchunheng family (thus solving the agency problem or divergence of interest problem), but he also admitted a certain ruthless calculation at work: salaries for ordinary workers were kept low, allowing more revenue to be diverted into performance shares. Still, Shi felt that the system encouraged hard work and reduced the inclination to embezzle. Other Yunnan firms apparently agreed, because they instituted similar incentive systems and continued to use them even as the firms grew in size and complexity.66 While it is not clear where Yunnan entrepreneurs first encountered performance shares, they resemble closely the practice pioneered by Shanxi province bankers, and it is possible that the Yunnanese learned it from Shanxi merchants. Because Shanxi banks operated over vast distances and were run by professional managers, the bank owners confronted at a relatively early time the challenge of aligning employee and ownership interests. The solution was a dual share system: shareholders could purchase equity shares (yin’gu) while employees could earn “body shares” or “expertise shares” (shen’gu).67 Thus, the shareholding system was designed in part to make sure that managers were accountable because their job stability and future earnings were subject to periodic performance reviews. When accounts were squared at the end of each business cycle (every three to five years), equity shareholders earned dividends based on the profits. Evaluations and performance shares were used to discipline and reward employees, including family members. The use of evaluations and performance shares reveal that many Yunnanese firms were not products of an idealistic, essentialist Confucian culture that relied on the duties of kinship and friendship. Instead, they adopted technologies of bookkeeping to align shareholder and employee goals. This is not to say that Confucian values were ignored; they were, in fact, embraced, at least initially, as a way to legitimize the new world of commerce and business. The Yongchangxiang founders, for example, grounded their pursuit of profit in Confucian

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orthodoxy, arguing that profit and partnerships had classical antecedents. Thus, their original contract referenced figures from well-worn Confucian texts: Guan (Zhong) and Bao (Shuya) were of one heart, and together they divided the profits of gold. . . . Zigong excelled in making commodities flourish; [he] followed the teacher, Master Kong, to the sage’s gate. Although he was a famous scholar studying Principle, he was also able to grasp and harness the power of profit.68

The Guan and Bao reference is well known: Bao allegedly helped the soonto-be-great Guan Zhong gain a position at the state of Qi in 685 BCE. Guan went on to become one of the most important ministers in the Chinese tradition. Because Guan and Bao were also business partners, they were often cited in arguments promoting commerce. The idea that Bao and Guan were of one heart was meant to evoke the idea of partnership as a sacred trust, while the references to Zigong and Master Kong (Confucius) were designed to further legitimize the pursuit of profit. As the Yongchangxiang founders well knew, however, legitimacy and trust were not enough, and like others, they developed regulations regarding employee conduct. These regulations did not focus on the classical ideals of friendship. Instead, they revealed the carnal desires that might disrupt business: “Immoral activities are prohibited—such as leaving one’s wife for a concubine, smoking opium, gambling, whoring, wandering about, or [other] illicit actions.”69 The need for such rules already hints at the fact they were sometimes broken, and in the Yunnan firms, enforcement of such rules was never absolute.70 Nevertheless, these regulations reveal a world in which trust, kinship, and friendship were overwritten by rules and material incentives. What made those rules and incentives work was the rise of record keeping. –•– If regulations and profit sharing were designed to maintain discipline in the firm and protect shareholders, then Yunnanese required a means for keeping track of capital, expenses, income, and profit. When were bookkeeping technologies first used in Yunnan? To the best of my knowledge, no one has investigated this. Based on my research, I can say with some confidence that by the 1850s, even small-scale Yunnanese merchants and pawnshops were keeping careful records. Thus, it is probable that the nineteenth century saw the importing and dissemination of many of the basic bookkeeping practices that had spread through the Chinese commercial world since the seventeenth century.



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At its most basic, Chinese bookkeeping relied on three types of documents: the caozhang for recording transactions while on the road or in the shop, the “daybook” or “journal” (liushuibu, liushuizhang) for organizing accounting at the end of the day, and the ledger (zongbu) for squaring accounts at the end of a business cycle.71 In Yunnan, there is evidence that by the mid-nineteenth century, local merchants and pawnbrokers were using various versions of these technologies. This evidence has been difficult to uncover, but over the past few decades, Tengchong’s Jia Zhiwei has collected documents and artifacts related to the region’s commercial tradition, and in 2012, the fruits of his labor were on exhibition at two small local museums, including the Heshun Caravan (da mabang) Museum, which I visited. Among Jia’s discoveries is an 1859 daybook. While it is unclear precisely who produced the daybook, it likely came from a local Tengchong merchant, and it is the earliest extant example of local bookkeeping that I know of. On the cover is written, “Respectfully begun in the eleventh month of the ninth year of the Great Qing Xianfeng reign, a daybook of expenses and income.” Based on the entries and format, the daybook resembles a pawnshop cash ledger.72 This one, however, also records purchases and sales, so it may have belonged to a shopkeeper who extended credit and engaged in trade. Each page has a rough upper and lower register. The upper register has columns used for recording receipts and payments; the receipts columns are started at the top of the page, while the payments (loans) columns are started at a slightly lower level. As in many other ledgers, this is designed to differentiate between income or receipts (ru) and expenses or outlays (chu). At the lower register, we find lists of the sums of money lent, goods pawned, and other miscellaneous items. The daybook’s entries record business conducted with a variety of customers, both women and men, and they provide small clues to lives in which money and goods were increasingly exchanged through the market. When money was lent, copper cash was the usual medium, since most of the daybook’s calculations were recorded in cash. Silver might also be lent in sums of several ounces. For most people, the amounts borrowed rarely exceeded several hundred cash, although at least two accounts included 1,500 cash or more in outstanding debt. In addition to lending cash, this merchant also purchased and sold goods, including polished rice, bird nests, hibiscus (presumably for medicine), and salt. Each borrower found a place in this daybook, and the relationship that was recorded was not one of neighbor, friend, relative, or fellow villager. Instead, the relationship was quantified as a transaction in copper cash or silver ounces.

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We can be more confident that the technology of bookkeeping was well developed in the Tengchong region by the 1880s. Mr. Jia’s collection includes an 1886 (Guangxu 12) ledger (zongbu) from a Tengchong firm, Renyuhe. Like ledgers elsewhere, this version was composed of block-printed sheets with red lined columns and a line through the middle to separate upper and lower registers. This particular ledger, moreover, reveals a level of bookkeeping specialization that was increasingly common in the Qing period: it was designed to record the firm’s shareholder transactions. It lists their capital invested, expenses, and money borrowed against their shares. This was, most likely, only one of a number of ledgers used to calculate the firm’s annual expenses, income, and profits.73 The ledger is also an interesting cultural artifact. Each page is a preprinted form that could be filled in by hand. The forms were produced by a press using carved blocks, which meant that for some businesses, it was necessary to purchase forms in bulk rather than produce them by hand on blank sheets. Yunnan businesses were apparently numerous enough to require professional printing services. On the lower-right and upper-left columns of each page, there are featured four-character phrases—executed in red ink—that reflect important aspects of business culture. In the lower right, damage to the document limits us to reading only two of four characters: they are qinbi, which is a call for diligence in bookkeeping, reflecting the larger context in which employees, including accountants, were urged to excel in order to meet the expectations and incentives set by ownership. The upper left of each page is graced with the phrase “the constellation of wealth shines brightly” (caixing gaozhao). The idea of a constellation controlling wealth has ancient roots in China, and it was thought that a person would prosper if the stars shone on him. The phrase itself is also found in an opera from the lower Yangtze region, Shuang Xiong meng, which was a sensation in the Qing period, and the association of this phrase with an accounting ledger may reflect the Yunnan merchants’ engagement with a larger world of cultural and material exchange. The ledger was designed to record partners’ capital and expenses—as well as the money they borrowed against their capital. These documents were probably used in many firms. For example, in the early twentieth century, Yongchangxiang kept similar documents, called “expense ledgers” (ziyong dibu), and their contents could be insightful. In his account of Yongchangxiang history, recall that Yang Kecheng reveals that his father, Yan Zizhen, became a spendthrift, purchasing expensive herbal medicines, clothing, and the fancy courtyard house in



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Xizhou town center. In 1918, Yan built a second lakeside house using imported materials. To do so, he borrowed against his investments in Yongchangxiang, leading his frugal partner, Yang Hongchun, to become so upset that he and Yan parted ways.74 What is fascinating about the story—and the spread of daybooks and ledgers—is that they bring us into a world in which relationships were defined in part by numbers and money. In these ledgers, Yunnanese worked out the figures that would define expenses, revenue, income, and the profit sharing that linked partners and employees together—or, in Yang’s and Yan’s case, drove them apart. When Yan Zizhen sent his nephews to Mandalay to open Yongchangxiang’s first international branch, he was not relying on their filial loyalty alone to incentivize hard, honest work. Like all other branch managers, they were expected to keep careful accounts of income and expenses—and to send those ledgers back to headquarters for evaluation. Clearly, relationships were coming to be defined by something more than friendship or kinship. Keeping track of the firms’ money—and therefore the relationships among partners and employees—were the accountants, and at some point in the nineteenth century, accounting became a specialized skill in Yunnan. The skill was so important that outstanding accountants were highly valued and even poached from other firms. In northern Yunnan, the Heqing firms such as Fuchunheng pioneered cutting-edge accounting and management practices. Shi Cilu has recounted how Fuchunheng adopted the performance shareholding system, and Heqing apprentices were so well trained that they were in demand by firms from other parts of Yunnan. In 1908, for example, Yongchangxiang hired Heqing native Su Yongjiu away from his original firm, and Su subsequently revolutionized Yongchangxiang’s accounting system.75 The tradition on which Su Yongjiu drew was at least several decades old (in Yunnan) by the time he moved to Yongchangxiang. By 1880 at the latest, even small-time Heqing merchants were using daybooks or journals to record their many transactions. In 2005, Hou Miaomiao came upon an 1880 daily journal kept by a merchant named Zhan Yuebo.76 Zhan worked for Yongshunhe, a small Heqing firm, and he was stationed near the Yunnan border with Kham in the town of Zhongdian, the famous trade outpost now named Shangri-La. In his daily journal, Zhan carefully noted his multiple transactions: credit extended to customers, interest rates, salaries owed to employees, and many other aspects of his business. It was this type of record that not only helped the managers of branch offices like Zhan, but were also requisitioned by the central office when they did their end-of-cycle bookkeeping.

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From Muleteers to Millionaires

To maintain control over branch managers, business owners came to demand ever-increasing volumes of paperwork. Fuchunheng’s central office, for example, required branch managers to submit all daybooks and ledgers so that all expenses could be verified. This became standard procedure for settling accounts every second or third year, and it represented a transformation of earlier practices. Most firms had simply requisitioned asset and profit-and-loss records, but this made it challenging to review daily expenditures. With the new Fuchunheng regulations, it became more difficult for branch managers to hide mistakes or omissions, giving the central office greater powers of oversight.77 Requisitioning record books was part of a larger effort to centralize power in firm headquarters, and Yunnan firms developed the practice of demanding regular reports (tongguanxin) from branch managers to the central office. Judging by the increasing frequency of tongguanxin, many firms sought to use these reports to increase central office power over the branches. By the 1930s, the large firms required weekly, systematically numbered official correspondence between branches and the central office.78 In Fuchunheng’s case, this correspondence was carefully studied and archived. Every month, after the central office collected and studied all of the branch reports, the general manager and central office staff held strategic planning sessions and formulated the next steps for each branch. This process was designed to maintain central control over the branches, and the communications were bound as record books, making them into de facto annual almanacs for the firm. As Yunnan firms expanded geographically, they turned to record keeping and communications to maintain contact between the central and branch offices. Far from a simple matter of rationalizing communications and record keeping, the implementation of accounting procedures helped the firms to conquer distance and geography by reshaping the behaviors of the firms’ agents. In this way, we might follow scholars of new accounting theory in their efforts to understand how, as Napier puts it, “accounting calculations in themselves promote particular kinds of social order and inhibit others,” making accounting a discipline that not only records selected realities but also creates new relationships and forms of power.79 While this process had been noted for states that operate over long distances,80 it is important to also think about firms’ efforts to control and centralize and the impacts that this made on owners, managers, and employees. They developed training programs to transform young men into apprentices and then managers, and adopted systems of communication, market investigation, record keeping, and oversight in order to extend their reach and



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power into other communities. If there is such a thing as colonial knowledge produced by expansive imperial states, then surely there is such a thing as business knowledge produced by expansive firms. Perhaps, like colonial knowledge, that business knowledge was more than just an objective reflection of reality; it was culturally constructed and shaped communities and actions.81 In the Yunnan case, the accounting system reinforced a firm’s efforts to discipline its workforce and synchronize employee and shareholder goals. In the process, figures and accounts came to define at least part of the relationship of partners, employees, and the firm, and, judging from the confrontation between Yang and Yan that ended the initial Yongchangxiang partnership, the issues of profit, loss, and reinvestment came to trump more idealistic approaches to defining business relations, such as the quaint notions of kinship or friendship where partners declared themselves to be of “one heart.” In other words, business knowledge could influence behavior and values, and thus the development of business knowledge in Yunnan offers important insights into a changing society. To build their businesses, Yunnan merchants borrowed specific bookkeeping practices that appear to have originated with the Shanxi banks and underpinned a particular approach to business management. These practices helped some Yunnanese develop a mastery of accounting and management that allowed their shareholding firms to operate over the great distances and rugged landscapes of the Southwest and beyond. The key to conquering geography and topography lay in the possibilities that record keeping could reshape relationships and behavior. Acquaintances, relatives, or neighbors might be recruited as partners, managers, or employees, but the Yunnanese entrepreneurs did not rely solely, or even mainly, on the loyalties of friendship and kinship to encourage others to serve the firm. Instead, they reinforced the soft discourse of kinship and friendship with the hard technologies of record keeping to create a powerful emphasis on professional competence and devotion to the firm. Competence and devotion were defined not by kinship or friendship itself, but by hard work and profit. It was evaluated by examining the ledgers, which revealed the operation of each branch of the firm. Gradually, then, a person’s worth was made calculable, and that calculability was designed to influence his behavior—to align his interests with those of the shareholders, allowing them to trust him even if he were hundreds or thousands of miles away. –•–

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From a positivist standpoint, we might consider the nineteenth century as a time when late imperial business practices were diffused to the Southwest, allowing native Yunnanese, whether Han, Hui, or Minjia, to make rational choices for organizing their firms. Such a conclusion assumes that bookkeeping and other efficiency-oriented management practices merely reflect obvious efforts to make business more effective. Certainly, effectiveness was important, and over the centuries, Chinese businessmen had developed effective record keeping and managerial practices on par with their European peers.82 But we might also add that accounting and managerial strategies were technologies related to a reshaping of behavior and relationships, an argument proposed by the new accounting historians, who interpret bookkeeping as a discursive practice bringing into being new categories, concepts, or ideas, some of them designed, as Napier puts it, to enable people “to act in ways that would previously not have been conceivable.”83 Yunnanese firm owners therefore adopted careful accounting methods to track their firms’ many transactions, and these figures were then used to calculate and divide profit. Who would get a share of the profits? In addition to equity shareholders, it was high-performing employees who were allowed to “divide the red” (fenhong) or take a share of profits. (Chinese businesses used red, the color of joy, to describe profits, not losses.) To divide the red, they had to distinguish high performers from low ones, which required measuring performance, which in turn required monitoring and evaluation. While others have ably explained the use of these profit-sharing and performance-based share systems,84 there has been little reflection on how these practices structured relationships and behaviors. In taking a new look at record keeping and management, it is important to consider their relationship to culture. Whereas it was once acceptable to chalk Chinese business success up to unchanging, essential Confucian values, insightful scholars long ago moved beyond such ahistorical explanations.85 So, why might managers and employees, who lived far from headquarters, be trustworthy in their work for the firm? For the Yunnan firms, the owners realized that values of loyalty and hierarchy, though articulated in employee training, were not enough. Instead, they came to rely on their employees’ desire for good performance evaluations. In the words and actions of merchants, moreover, performance and profit were considered more important than friendship or kinship. Perhaps we need to further emphasize that a sense of obligation and loyalty to the firm was not passed on simply through traditional socialization and



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education, but primarily through the development of company rules and regulations, performance evaluations, and the collection of information, which was linked to profit sharing. These things shaped people’s actions and allowed the Yunnan firms to operate across vast distances. The fact that they could operate on such scales, moreover, brought power to the firms—power in the form of wealth and knowledge, for the managers were sending home information about places, resources, and peoples well beyond their home regions, and that knowledge was absorbed by the firms as they gained greater control over longdistance trade in the Southwest. Thus, the cumulative actions of profit-oriented merchant firms were reshaping borderlands’ livelihoods and communities, including the merchants’ own communities.

2

Families

The Burmese wife is actually a monkey spirit designed to harm humans With sweet, coaxing words, she passes the opium pipe and the betel leaf chew. With her oiled, combed hair and powdered face, she teases you. Trapped in a scheme designed to bewilder you, no one can come to save you. You’re like a carp on a hook. —Qingnian baojian, ca. 1870

then the syphilis or the opium would. At least that was the message the merchant Cun, if that was his name, had for any young men who were considering the merchant life. According to legend, Mr. Cun hailed from Big Stone Alley, a well-known, wealthy neighborhood in Heshun. Living at some time in the mid- to late nineteenth century, Mr. Cun is the alleged author (or recorder) of the anguished ballad, “Precious Mirror for Youth” (Qingnian baojian), also known as “Precepts for Yangwendun” (Yangwendun xiaoyin). Yangwendun, as Heshun residents will tell you, is an ancient name for their town, and the text, which I call the Yangwendun, is considered to have been written primarily to warn the young people of Heshun about the many dangers facing them. In his references to Burmese women, prostitutes, opium, and gambling, among other vices, Cun employs a common ten-syllable line pattern to capture the decadence and dangers (“For some, [the syphilis] carves away at the ears, nose, eyes, and mouth.”) of the Mandalay demimonde. The details are so vivid that Cun must have witnessed many of these experiences that he warns against: IF THE BURMESE WOMEN DIDN’T GET YOU,

In a few years, [the opium addict] changes appearance to look like a monkey. The skin of the mouth seems like it was dyed with black lacquer.

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The nape of the neck appears to be like a steel steelyard hook. The hair, all in a lump, looks like a broom. The back is humped and seems to have hooked the head. The filth on one’s feet is more than an inch thick. The clothes are stained with the advertisements for opium filth.

The Yangwendun is both fascinating and somewhat of a mystery. The fascination stems from its topics, which range from child rearing to opium addiction to sexually transmitted diseases. The mystery lies in the dating and authorship. While these mysteries have been addressed by local scholars, including the prolific Yin Wenhe, their conclusions have been unconvincing. Thus far, scholars have evaluated two copies of the Yangwendun: one from the late nineteenth century and one from the 1930s. Yin Wenhe and Yang Fa’en both published annotated versions based on these two copies, with notes that explain any differences between the two.1 I have read the published versions as well a Republican-era (1912–1949) copy in Jia Zhiwei’s collection. The copies have few variations; they consist of 790 lines, most of them ten-character sentences of the 3-3-4 pattern. There are, however, three sections in which lines of twelve characters (6-6 pattern) have been written, using the old West River Moon (Xijiangyue) tune pattern. Yin Chunxiao believes that the ten-character sentence structure was a popular one for storytelling in Heshun up through the early twentieth century.2 And Wilt Idema has noted that the tencharacter structure was common to prose poetry in North China. In addition, the subject of morality, as well as emigration and its dangers (including prostitution and gambling), reveals a remarkable similarity to the topics of the highly mobile Hakka communities of Southeast China, Taiwan, and overseas.3 If this was a popular document, as all evidence suggests, it was created for an audience who sprinkled a little Burmese into their everyday (Yunnanese) language: its phrases are peppered with local terminology and Burmese words.4 Fortunately for me, Yang Fa’en’s annotations explain the specialized vocabulary. It is thought that the Yangwendun was a learning tool for Heshun children, particularly for boys who would go abroad to do business. It might be read, but it could also be recited: Yin Kangping argues that the Yangwendun was spread orally as well as in written form. He also thinks that men and women continued to read it into adulthood.5 I agree that this was an educational text. Not only did the unknown author state his intention to “use these common words to warn my many fellow-villagers,” but his chosen format bears resemblance to school

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primers. The lines rhyme, and the 3-3-4 pattern rarely varies. Like the children’s primer Sanzi jing, the Yangwendun was apparently composed to instruct and be memorized.6 Dating the text is difficult, however. Yin Wenhe has argued that the book was produced in Burma during the Daoguang reign (1821–1850). His evidence for this is that he heard from fellow Heshun resident Cun Zhenhua that in 1940, when Cun entered the famous Yiqun Middle School, he (Cun) was told by headmaster Li Renjie that the text had been written by a Cun family member who hailed from Big Stone Alley. Li also told Cun that the book had been passed down for five generations. Yin took this information, calculated that a generation should equal approximately thirty years, and guessed that the author, Mr. Cun, lived about 150 years earlier. Setting aside the potential debates about hearsay and the length of a generation, Yin was not clear about which year he was counting back from; nevertheless, most authors follow him in dating the text to 1850. One exception is Yi Li, who has suggested that the Yangwendun (or Yangwentun) circulated widely during the eighteenth century, though there is no evidence for this claim.7 Yin also heard another story from his grandmother: that the author, the mysterious Mr. Cun, was on his deathbed when he finished the Yangwendun. This, then, was the pained and desperate last words of a dying man.8 Whether Yin is correct is open to debate, and I argue that 1850 is too early for this text. The experiences described in the text suggest a familiarity with formal apprenticeship programs and a systematic approach to commerce dating to the later nineteenth century. In fact, one of the author’s laments is the transition from informal, seasonal sojourning in Burma to the formal, long-term assignments for managers that emerged in the latter half of the nineteenth century. While some of the material might date to earlier oral versions, the majority of the Yangwendun describes the situation of the 1870s or 1880s at the earliest. Nevertheless, I agree with Yin that this document was written by a merchant who had done business in Burma. As Yin notes, the author claims to have “originally been a man on the road, miserable and suffering,” and his descriptions of certain practices correlate with other accounts by Heshun men in Burma. From gambling and opium smoking to brothels and illness, the author revealed a profound understanding of the dark sides of business life in Burmese towns. One of those dark sides was the impact on family life. As money and profits came to influence relations between corporate shareholders, managers, and employees, they were also increasingly at the center of merchant family life. As men

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and boys took up positions in the companies and traveled farther afield for longer periods of time, they left behind wives, children, and parents, and their main connections with home took the form of letters and remittances. These funds created a new role for money in the local merchant communities: the things it bought were increasingly defining a new culture of consumption—even a new culture of a nascent merchant class—among Yunnanese merchant families. Although people’s worth became calculable and greater consumption became the norm among the emerging merchant elite, it was recognized that these changes came with a cost. Commerce, consumption, and mobility were transforming families and communities, and this was widely lamented. In their efforts to adjust to these changes, the men and women of merchant villages began to develop new understandings of their world, and as those understandings developed, they also created new practices and institutions that reflected those understandings. Following Max Weber and Liah Greenfield, these new understandings might be called rationalizations. In this context, a rationalization is an interpretation of the world that imposes some order—or rationality—on the chaos of day-to-day life.9 An example of a rationalization might be the idea that widespread human suffering is simply the reality of this world—or the design of a divine creator—and humans must overcome it through self-abnegation or faith to either reach enlightenment or to be welcomed into heaven. Rationalizing therefore is an utterly human action. It is a process for making sense of a potentially senseless world. Although an individual can rationalize for himself, the most powerful rationalizations are developed by communities. These community rationalizations give rise to “a particular image of order,” says Greenfield, that becomes normative and, I might add, institutionalized through the creation of new practices, organizations, and rituals. It is helpful to envision nineteenth-century southwesterners as a community of people undergoing such rending changes that many felt the need for new rationalizations. One major cause of change was commercialization, which originated in the eighteenth century, and the related issue of geographical mobility, made possible through the expansion of corporations. Such mobility brought both opportunity and danger. How could the opportunities of profit be seized and the dangers of materialism and loss be neutralized? To seize the opportunities, some Yunnanese embraced trade and rationalized the trading life as either ethical or, at least, a necessary sacrifice to support the family. They created new (for the region) organizations, which took the form of shareholding trading firms in which partnership and profit-sharing techniques were

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borrowed from Shanxi traditions. In the process, it became normative in some towns for families to invest in, and men and boys to run or work for, business firms. These communities began to adapt their expectations for and training of their children to prepare them for a life in business. But in the eyes of locals, the rise of the business firm brought deeply disturbing trends too. People experienced a sense of disruption as their lives were transformed by contracts, commodities, and male mobility. Men left home, often for years at a stretch, and many went to Mandalay and Rangoon, where they had to adapt to both Burmese and British colonial ways. Men might also be stationed in northwestern Yunnan, western Sichuan, and even Lhasa, where they also faced unfamiliar political and social hierarchies. These late-nineteenth-century sojourners foreshadowed the 1920s and 1930s, when elite Yunnanese businessmen worked at firm branches in Shanghai, Hong Kong, and Kolkata. Although the rewards for staffing a distant branch office were great, there was also risk for the manager and his family alike. What if a young merchant lost his money to thieves or gamblers? What if he fell ill, perhaps felled by a venereal disease contracted in Mandalay’s “flower boulevards and willow lanes”? What if, as the chapter epigraph implies, he forgot himself and married a foreign woman, his income then diverted to her family? If he never returned, who would support the man’s parents and wife at home? Such anxieties appear to have become increasingly common in the late nineteenth century. In Heshun, locals confronted these anxieties by turning to new values: a strong emphasis on discrete gender roles and promotion of the formal lineage. Thus, even as a new business ethos of valuing individual performance over kinship was being codified through firm regulations, the Han merchant communities in Heshun and Tengchong also developed new formal lineage organizations. This process paralleled but did not replicate the creation of lineages in Xizhou. The merchants of Heshun did not need a facade of Han identity for themselves, as was the case for Minjia merchants like the Yans. Instead, they desired a modicum of stable, highly gendered kinship relations in a world of mobility and consumption. In other words, they sought some certainty in an uncertain world. To do this, they turned to the same mechanism that the Minjia traders were using to claim elite Han status: the highly gendered extended lineage organization. While some might call these actions traditional because the lineage has deep roots in parts of China, to do so is to ignore the context. In response to new conditions, people were deploying lineage institutions and

Families 55

rituals on a scale never before seen locally. In other words, locals were not retreating to long-standing practices but adapting ideas designed to rationalize a changing world. In this chapter, then, we focus on Yunnanese merchants and their kin as agents of change in the modern Southwest. Such a focus turns away from a typical emphasis on migrants and outsiders, not because outsiders are unimportant but because they are only part of the story. During the Ming (1368– 1644) and Qing, the imperial states promoted the conquest and settlement of the Southwest, and from the 1300s to the 1850s, several large waves of agricultural migrants settled southwestern plains, valleys, and hills, changing the land.10 When Burma and Indochina became European domains, the colonial governments set policies and built railroads designed to harvest minerals from China’s Southwest and to open China’s backdoor for industrial products. These outsiders, whether Chinese or not, had a major impact. It is important to acknowledge outsiders and the changes they wrought, but if we focus exclusively on their stories, we create serious problems. One of the most pressing problems in borderlands history is to explain the links between the eighteenth century, with its dynamic pioneering migrants from central China, its rapid commercial growth, and its often brutal military conquests, and the Late Qing and Republican periods (ca. 1870s–1949). Chinese scholars have difficulty linking the two eras because of their ongoing focus on the first Opium War (1839–1842) as a seminal rupture in history. If foreign intervention was so disruptive, then does the rapid commercial growth of the eighteenth century even matter to later eras?11 In Western-language scholarship, historians have focused on the High Qing (ca. 1660–1799), when the mighty Kangxi, Yongzheng, and Qianlong emperors ruled, and the state, along with migrants, utterly transformed the frontiers of the Southwest and Northwest.12 But what happens after this, and how can we understand local agency in such a framework? Only recently have scholars begun providing compelling answers.13 To address these problems, this chapter and the next continue exploring native Yunnanese merchants and their impacts on regional history. –•– Southwesterners who grew up in the nineteenth century faced a different world, a world that relied increasingly on trade, commodities, and money. The discovery of the 1859 daybook in Jia Zhiwei’s collection reveals how a single shopkeeper might do business with a range of people. The shopkeeper’s

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loans suggest the increasing importance of cash, interest, and calculations in daily life. But how did these changes in commerce and human relations affect communities? Like Richard Lufrano, I would argue that the late imperial period—and, more precisely for the Southwest, the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries—witnessed a transformation of merchant culture.14 Like Lufrano, I turn to merchant texts, where I also find an emphasis on self-cultivation as a means to adapt elite orthodoxy to the needs of upwardly mobile merchants, though this trend in selfcultivation was not overwhelming. There was an increasingly pragmatic “business spirit,” especially in preparing boys for careers, but this ethos was not free of Confucian influence, as others have suggested.15 Mostly I find anxious communities seeking to justify wealth and cope with mobility and the monetization of relationships. In this search for legitimacy and stability, they sought new ways to rationalize and organize. Before we probe the concerns of nineteenth-century Yunnanese merchants, however, we briefly explore early twentieth-century merchant life, when vibrant rituals celebrated the extended family and pedagogies had been developed to prepare sons for commercial life. This exploration will help us take the measure of the enormous changes in earlier periods. In the twentieth century, both Heshun and Xizhou had vibrant lineagebased activities, traces of which are still alive today. If one walks through dusty Xizhou in mid-July, the lineage temples are open as older lineage members mobilize for midsummer ancestral sacrifices. Small groups of people are in the temples, preparing for the big days. The temples themselves represent the great merchant families: Yan, Dong, Yang, and Yin (see figure 7). Although weak in organization, the Xizhou lineages originally were part of an effort to establish Han identity for these Minjia families. Farther to the west, in Heshun, a brief stroll reveals large, stone lineage temples that dominate the town, projecting an air of permanence and majesty (see figure 8). Like nearby gravestones celebrating the local lineage founders, the temples’ discourse of stone is about longevity and permanence, but that discourse is misleading. While today’s temple rituals seem quite modest, the merchant lineages of the 1930s and 1940s celebrated lavishly, using their lineage temples and genealogies to establish a sense of grandeur. In the 1940s, when Francis Hsu worked in Xizhou, he witnessed a million-dollar (Chinese national yuan) funeral that lasted a month. He also estimated the cost of a wedding for a shopkeeper’s son to be ten thousand dollars—at a time when laborers earned a little over two dollars per day.16 Hsu concluded that lineages competed fiercely, seeking preeminence through the

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FIGURE 7.   Yan

lineage temple in Xizhou.

S ou rc e : Photograph by the author.

majesty of rituals, volume of genealogical research, lavishness of temples, and size of contributions to public festivals.17 The tools used to create this sense of preeminence and permanence were the buildings and genealogies, but neither of these institutions was very old. In the Tengchong area, it was not until the late eighteenth century that some elites began publishing genealogies and only in the nineteenth century that they began to construct lineage temples. The Cuns of Heshun, for example, broke ground for Heshun’s first lineage temple in 1810, precisely when the family was finding some success by sending men to Burma for trade.18 Some even argue that Heshun lineage construction was defined by the use of capital from abroad, a claim that seems to fit the cases of both the Cuns and their neighbors, the Yins, who built Heshun’s second lineage temple in the 1830s. The Yin temple lands were bought with money sent back from Burma.19 Over time, other lineages built their temples as they prospered, and by the 1930s, Heshun town life was punctuated by developments at these important institutions. Local merchants in Xizhou also built temples and constructed their lineages. As in Heshun, the grand rituals and lavish architecture masked the relative

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From Muleteers to Millionaires

FIGURE 8.   One

of the lineage temples in Heshun.

Sou rc e : Photograph by the author.

newness of the lineage system; unlike Heshun, the flourishes of lineage life also masked the weaknesses of the local lineage organization. Local marriage customs continued toward small families and early property division, although the accumulation of wealth in merchant families drove them to create the trappings of large, extended lineages.20 By the 1940s, when Hsu was conducting his field studies, the lineages were indeed prominent but still institutionally weak. They built elaborate ancestral temples and held annual rituals, but they still had no lineage councils and no extensive corporate landholdings—the hallmarks of powerful lineage organizations. The prevailing local patterns were still early family division, with each husband and wife controlling their own share of property and setting up their own kitchen.21 The main function of the lineage seems to have continued to be—like the learning of Chinese—to help merchants navigate a primarily Han world. At the same time that Heshun and Xizhou families were developing genealogies and lineage temples, they were also training their boys to be merchants. Hsu surveyed fifty-one Xizhou households and recorded the occupations of all males over the age of fifteen. Of 125 men, Hsu found that 58 were merchants or

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shopkeepers.22 This becomes less surprising, perhaps, if we realize that families were pushing their sons to pursue commerce, a finding uncovered in the years immediately after 1949, when investigators combed the Yunnan countryside, recording local practices. The Dali region investigators unearthed a small volume that is frequently referred to as “Good Words for Commerce” (Shangye liangyan). This short book was incorporated into a set of lineage materials and was clearly intended as an educational text for boys.23 The text’s authors urged the boys to graduate from elementary school and, if lacking the talent for further study in middle school, to prepare for a life in business. The path to success, the manual noted, lay in completing a firm’s apprentice program: If a boy is honest and truly applies himself, in three years he can make progress. If he makes progress at the firm, then he can be given an important post, travel far to set up a branch office, and serve as manager.

The volume’s significance lies not just in its practical contents but in underlying expectations that boys would serve a firm far from home. Based on the language in the book, we can tentatively date it to the early Republican period, perhaps the 1910s, when elementary and middle schools were becoming common in Yunnan’s wealthier trade towns.24 By this time, families expected their sons to leave home, and they prepared the boys for it. In earlier periods, however, the idea of sons leaving home for long stretches was new and worrisome. The “Good Words” therefore reveals that a major transition in rationalization had taken place. The expectations of working in a firm had been rationalized, and parents were training boys to quickly acclimate to the rigors of apprentice life: rising at dawn, cleaning the offices, and keeping accurate daybooks. The concise, matter-of-fact presentation in the “Good Words” could not be more different from merchant Cun’s stern, preachy Yangwendun, a text recorded about two generations earlier. If we examine the structure of the Yangwendun, its didactic nature becomes apparent. This was a text designed to instruct on several levels. After the opening poem, for example, the first section introduces basic mythological and historical figures, from Pangu and Shun to Emperor Han Wendi; immediately following are twenty-three lines devoted to the twenty-four exemplars of filial piety and their virtuous actions that defined good behavior. (Why only twenty-three lines if there were twenty-four exemplars? For some reason, one exemplar, Wang Xiang, was left out, perhaps overlooked at some point when someone recopied the text.) The author explained the point of these lessons:

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These are the songs of the twenty-four filial and obedient ones, which have been handed down for centuries And they urge [us], in today’s age, to think carefully about the path to becoming a person and a son. The grace of our parents is good and seems like the lofty Heavens and the bountiful Earth. Every day [that] one lives, [should be] a day for filiality, so how can one rove afar? [It is because] we have no choice. To alleviate our families’ poverty, we must leave.

Here, then, was the crux of the problem for this author: familial stability and economic necessity were increasingly at odds, and this was a relatively recent problem: We, who are of China, head out to Burma; Han and foreigners trade goods back and forth. [Traditionally] we left in the eleventh month and, in the fourth month, we returned home early. We dealt in cotton, we bought gem stones, then we returned [home] to sell them And this was the strategy for making a living in our Tengchong. But why, at this time, have you not returned to your old friends?

The author pined for a bygone era when trading was seasonal and not yet a professionalized and institutionalized pursuit, and he pointedly asked why the men no longer returned home each spring—a question intended to reflect an all-too-real change in business patterns. Heshun’s boys and men were leaving home not just for the trading season, but for years on end. And this mobility provoked in the author a fear for the future of community life, one that crept into many corners of Heshun society. The author’s and community’s anxieties about commerce, mobility, and their impact on Heshun are explored in the Yangwendun’s other sections. After discussing the filial exemplars, the author provides an intentionally heart-rending section about the difficulties of birthing a child and raising a son. While this section is tedious, it provides fascinating glimpses into the (sometimes universal) concerns of parents (the intense labor—and mess—associated with infant care, the gnawing fear that a child will make the wrong friends). Far from presenting merely a generic discussion of parenting, however, the Yangwendun reveals insights about Yunnanese parenthood and ritual life, detailing such practices as the Third Day Ritual, in which relatives and friends arrived to

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congratulate a family on its new baby, the horoscopes cast to predict a child’s future, and the desperate offerings to Guanyin when a child contracted smallpox. The entire section is designed to alert boys to the sacrifices that parents make. The author’s unvarnished point was to provide the boys with enough guilt to accompany them to Burma and back, because the author’s main hope was that the sons would one day return home. If the Yangwendun was designed to leverage guilt as a means of teaching loyalty, it also provides fascinating comments on commercialization and consumption. The author indicted his changing society for its increasingly materialistic ways: Nowadays, customs have changed; they are not like the old days: At the busy markets, we are all drawn to the superficiality of the brands.

This emphasis on material goods, he argued, forced people to invest in lavish rituals. At a wedding banquet, the guests expected the hosts to serve seafood (no mean feat in landlocked Yunnan). Once the marriage ceremony was concluded, moreover, the groom’s family would continue to worry that their new daughter-in-law was materialistic and lacked the skills and grit to make ends meet: [The in-laws] fear that [she] will love to laze about, wandering outside the gates of the home; They fear that [she] will not know how to save for the future.

Such fears might easily be disregarded as the rumblings of a grumpy, aging man, but in the mysterious Mr. Cun’s defense, the merchants of Yunnan were pioneering an extravagant material culture. In his work, Zhou Zhisheng has argued that borderland merchants, much like the compradores of Shanghai, were at the forefront of a new consumerism that emphasized clothing, expensive medicines, and fine foods. As we saw in the previous chapter, merchants such as Yan Zizhen and his son Baocheng were building posh houses that incorporated their own interpretations of European architecture. And, Zhou confirms, marriage rituals were indeed becoming more lavish.25 While Zhou attributes these changes to the impact of foreign imperialism on Yunnan, the Yangwendun seems to provide evidence that this transition was occurring at least a decade before the large-scale importing of foreign goods in the 1890s. In other words, the drive to consume was coming from within Yunnan and not just from without. Although foreign goods and practices might

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influence the development of consumption—the Maoheng firm’s general manager developed a fondness for Arrow shirts tailored at the Comfy Man (Kangfu) store in Shanghai26—the tendency to identify foreigners and outsiders (migrants) as the main drivers of change in the Southwest is incomplete. The merchants of Xizhou and Heshun were also transforming their own communities. And the Yangwendun reveals their perceptions of their own world in their own words. The Yangwendun reveals a world in which a new materialism was emerging as a product of earlier commercialization, and in the author’s mind, this new materialism was a problem linked to gender. The problem starts with the marriage negotiation, he thought: brides’ families were driving increasingly hard bargains, seeking to squeeze as many gifts from the groom as possible. However, the author also argued that the problem continued after the marriage ceremony: From ancient times it is said that men seek and women collect and keep; In other villages, the women primarily spin and weave. In our district, however, they love to powder their faces and oil their hair; Throughout our area, [women] are glib-tongued And skilled in dressing and wondrous at make-up. None of them understand shame: When the money is used up, they ask someone to compose a letter And they call on their husbands to send the remittances back early. If the remittances don’t come, then they solicit loans from relatives; They write out a bill of exchange, which is sent to Mandalay, where the full amount is recovered.

While the author was certain that women simply spent money, with little attention to savings, he also implied that this behavior could be linked to the absenteeism of the husband: When she married her husband, she originally hoped they would be together for a century, And when he left, at that time she was miserable and distressed.

The author saw a series of interconnected problems: an increasingly mobile male population, an increasingly materialistic female population, and the implicit fear that this would destabilize the community. His solutions to the problems were to urge men to return home as soon as possible and urge women to take up the orthodox ways of the wife: spinning and weaving to earn extra income and careful thrift to save for the future.

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The Yangwendun was produced in an era of increasing mobility, when families in Heshun and other parts of Yunnan were developing new business techniques in order to adapt to the commercialization that had been transforming their world since the early eighteenth century. The text’s emphasis on filial behavior and proper gender roles reflects the increasing importance of new lineage practices in the face of the decidedly modern challenges of mobility and money, and the text was part of a larger community effort to reorganize and rationalize in the face of a fast-changing world. While the Yangwendun may have been a local manual, distinct in its circulation among Heshun families, it was also part of a broader set of changes that reflect how Yunnan’s merchants were both adapting to and pushing forward major transformations. This was an act of creation, not of continuity, and it reveals something different about the Yunnan experience of lineage formation from those we see in other parts of China. In Sichuan and Huizhou, for example, formal, institutionalized lineages predated and then created the businesses.27 But in Yunnan, it was the other way around: businessmen used their profits to create the lineage. Still, Yunnanese shared some similar concerns with the great Huizhou merchant lineages that Qitao Guo studied. The turn to lineage institutions was designed to address anxieties stemming from changes in the economy, and they were also designed to discipline women.28 But women were not the only targets. So were mobile men. In their effort to adapt to a changing world of commerce, Yunnan merchants created practices that were new but came to be considered traditional. In Heshun, some residents today still venerate the ideal of the Confucian-merchant (rushang), which they identify as local culture. In her fieldwork, I-Chieh Fang discovered that Heshun people’s Confucian demeanor is so pronounced even today that residents of surrounding areas treat it as an object of fun.29 Still, locals take pride in their forebears’ combination of business savvy and putatively traditional mores. Heshun intellectual Cun Shichang, for instance, has spent years collecting materials that reveal a pre-Communist village world full of precise courtesies and rituals that are interpreted as Confucian.30 For locals, this behavior reflected an ancient culture, passed down from fifteenthcentury patriarchs, but we might understand it as a rationalization to cope with the modern nineteenth-century challenges of mobility and consumption. It was also the first step in the creation of a new Yunnanese elite merchant culture, not unlike the dynamic creation of bourgeois culture in Shanghai and the United States at about the same time.31 Like their Shanghai and American

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contemporaries, Yunnanese merchants developed new mores, built elaborate homes (and ancestral temples), and created a program of civic philanthropy that would bind them together while setting them apart. At first, however, the Yunnan merchants did not try to stand out in the materially oriented ways of late-nineteenth-century Shanghai merchants; instead, they tended to produce a culture that imitated Confucian ideals—as had commercial men throughout the empire for decades.32 They sought to be Confucian merchants. In later years, as merchants continued to define a new culture amid a changing China, the collective mores, architecture, and philanthropic concerns would change with the times, and a new generation of merchants would seek to destroy the town’s Confucian ideals and replace them with a devotion to global modernity. –•– Through merchant actions, we can begin to understand the long-term implications of the Qing period in borderlands regions. Spurred on by the state’s military conquests, promotion of the grain and copper trades, and investment in transport, the Southwest became a commercialized place by the end of the eighteenth century. In response to these changes (and before the later European conquests of Southeast Asia), some Yunnanese villagers began to develop shareholding partnerships designed to trade commodities across the Southwest and Southeast Asia. To do so, they borrowed management and record-keeping practices from other parts of the empire, but these practices led to important changes. On one level, record keeping allowed firms to act across vast distances; on another level, the records reflected new types of relationships. Instead of being acquaintances, friends, or kin, individuals also became partners, shareholders, managers, or employees—subject to the rules of the firm and all supposedly seeking to increase the firm’s profits. In this new ordering of the world, kinship was downplayed, suggesting that these firms were run in ways far different from the stereotypical Confucian family firms imagined by some scholars. Texts such as the Yangwendun and the “Good Words” were designed to prepare children for this new norm in which mobility and trade were central. The texts reveal that families were developing forms of training for children that acknowledged new roles and technical abilities. The Yangwendun advised its readers on demeanor (“When you speak, never do so loudly; adopt a gentle temperament”) and on skills. It urged the boys to study diligently both foreign languages and new bookkeeping technologies:

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When studying foreign languages, take care to frequently practice speaking them aloud. When studying composition and calculation, constantly keep in mind that doing business requires fairness and do not cheat the old and the young. Never expend energy on implementing deceitful schemes. When keeping the account books, take care to avoid omissions

These skills would become formal parts of the apprenticeship training in many firms, and the “Good Words” would not only prepare boys for life as apprentices but also urge them to imagine themselves using these skills as managers in the future. Thus, these two texts reveal how communities in two Yunnan regions, Heshun and Dali, had come to envision the merchant life as a normative male experience. At the same time, there was clearly a sense that commerce and mobility were threatening. With sons and husbands away for long periods of time— and cash flowing into Heshun—Mr. Cun seems to have articulated the fears of many: What happens if men become unmoored from home life? What happens if women are left with access to money but no companionship? The author turns to discourses on filiality and traditional gender roles, an approach linked to a larger set of rationalizations that included importing lineage practices. Yunnanese merchants and their communities entered the twentieth century with increasingly powerful transnational businesses and a vibrant but relatively new set of lineage temples at the center of their villages. One purpose of these lineages, like that of the Yangwendun itself, was to encourage the increasingly mobile culture of the merchant villages but to make sure that the boys always remembered to come home. For a man like Li Jingtian, who was born in the early twentieth century, these earlier adaptations to large-scale and long-term changes would shape his life. At a young age, he was sent off to Mandalay and Rangoon to learn Burmese, English, and bookkeeping. He later ran a large, transnational trading company, feeling that he evaluated his employees based on merit rather than kinship. And when his time in Burma was up, he returned to Heshun to live out his days—loyal to the home and hearth that he assumed had produced him. The mysterious Mr. Cun, the author of the Yangwendun, would have been proud.

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Turkish women have already lifted the darkness of the hijab. Russia has destroyed the superstitions of religious idols. Even natives of uncivilized South America and Africa are making every effort to enter the path of progress. And Heshun? Alas, deeply corrupt Heshun! —Chongxin hui wu zhounian tekan (May 1931)

borderlands Yunnanese began to travel more frequently and for longer durations, this trend was intensified in the first four decades of the twentieth century. Some men left for schooling, some to labor, but many were dispatched from the trade towns to do business in Kunming, Shanghai, Mandalay, or Rangoon, or in smaller trade and mining towns around China, Tibet, Burma, and India. These merchant migrants were nurtured in an environment that encouraged them to look abroad while keeping an eye on home. Their firms fostered their mobility, which brought them face-to-face with new ideas and experiences. Some joined organizations designed to transform others: their children, their colleagues, the people in their home communities, and the Chinese nation. It came to matter to them that Turkish women need not wear the traditional hijab in public.1 They came to accept imperialist racist hierarchies and European concepts of progress, and when they looked at their Yunnan hometowns, they saw not progress but superstition, darkness, and oppression. And they set out to destroy this alleged backwardness, including the lineage and gender norms that had recently been constructed by their kin. The goal to transform others led some Yunnan merchants to join the Revolutionary Alliance in Burma and to participate in bringing down the Qing empire IF, IN THE LATE NINETEENTH CENTURY,

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in 1911. In the years after 1911, there continued to be a restlessness and dissatisfaction with the China that the revolution had wrought. Yunnanese were not alone in this dissatisfaction, of course, but their actions reveal how disruptive the early twentieth-century ideas about nation, race, gender, and progress were. These ideas influenced many businessmen who had the resources to transform their communities in ways that ideally brought personal glory as well as social progress. The fact that these merchants came to think in terms of the social or society (shehui), as well as in progress (jinbu), reveals how widespread the modernist ideas of the 1920s and 1930s were. If modernists believe that there is such a thing as “society” and that society can be investigated, analyzed, and manipulated through rational policies, then some of the men and women of Yunnan’s trade towns came to be modernists like their contemporaries in larger cities such as Guangzhou. Like Cantonese merchant-reformers, the Yunnanese progressives spoke of representing “the people” or “the masses,” and they created voluntary organizations that challenged entrenched hometown elites. The new ideas and vocabulary provided ways to claim local power and prestige, as well as to target the older generations’ ideals about Confucianism, lineage, and gender.2 For Yunnanese merchants and their families, the experience of migration, especially to Burma, was a significant part of this process. Migration to China’s big cities—Kunming, Chongqing, Chengdu, and Shanghai—could also be life changing. In Burma, however, migrants encountered a number of important experiences, especially in the years 1905 to 1937, that would shape a variety of outcomes. There was the British colonial state, which was building powerful institutions, particularly schools, that would make some migrants think carefully about who they were and how they wanted their children educated. In this era, too, Yunnanese encountered Cantonese and Hokkien with much greater frequency. While these encounters were primarily commercial, they also brought opportunities to participate in life-altering movements, such as the Revolutionary Alliance, and to access powerful ideas, such as the May Fourth attacks on Confucianism, that were both Chinese and transnational at the same time. And, of course, Yunnanese in Burma were surrounded by the British Empire’s diverse subjects: Indian, Bamar, Shan, and highlanders. It was in this environment that some migrants developed new aspirations that were shaped by the particularities of the historical moment and the Yunnanese past.3 Various Yunnanese experienced Burma in different ways, of course, and these individual experiences led to different outcomes. Some acculturated to local ways, disappearing into Burmese society and out of the genealogies so

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recently compiled in Heshun and Xizhou. Some focused on local community building in Burma and, in Yi Li’s words, “found a way of ‘being Burmese Chinese,’ ” which included developing a collective identity shared with Cantonese and Hokkiens.4 Here, I challenge Li’s conclusion that the colonial state forced Yunnanese into a “conscious choice: either to be the loyal subjects of the Middle Kingdom on one side of the border or be immigrants (and subjects of a European empire) on the other.”5 We will encounter those who both built local community institutions in Burma and developed a powerful modern Chinese identity manifested in efforts to transform the Chinese nation from the ground up, starting in the hometown. This was true of both the Han merchants from Heshun and Tengchong as well as Xizhou’s Minjia merchants. As in other Chinese diaspora experiences, those who built local community institutions in Burma did so by animating and adapting the commercial, philanthropic, and educational institutions that had been part of Chinese migrant life for several centuries.6 This meant joining merchant associations (huiguan), supporting schools and local cemeteries, and developing transnational voluntary associations that invested in education and philanthropic ventures.7 In many ways, the Yunnanese of Burma were no different from other Chinese migrants. They resembled, on a smaller scale, the Hokkien merchants who left Xiamen for international ports where they developed new identities and a desire and ability to remake their home city.8 But there are also important differences. For these Hokkien, their experiences abroad led many to turn against some of the foundations of Western modernity, including Enlightenment thought, while still seeking to create a modern Chinese identity based on their understanding of the Confucian past.9 This Hokkien vision was both similar to and very different from Yunnanese visions. Like the Hokkien, Yunnanese merchants considered Chinese education as a means for defining and preserving Chineseness in a cosmopolitan world, but they actively campaigned against hometown scholars and older merchants who sought to reinvent Confucianism. Instead of rejecting the concepts of the Renaissance and Enlightenment as they understood them, Yunnanese activists embraced them, pursuing the belief that Yunnan itself needed such ideas. Thus, although Yunnanese came to deeply admire the Hokkien and their schools, they developed their own vision for modern China, one shaped by both experiences in Burma, where they witnessed and rejected the path of assimilation, and the politics of the hometown, where the movements of Confucian lineage creation and conservative redemptive societies were strong. We therefore



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can begin to understand why Yunnanese progressive merchants sought to be modern in ways that both resembled and yet diverged from other transnational merchant communities. They used many of the same institutional tools, but did so under a different configuration of circumstances. Yunnanese merchants, then, were part of larger political and cultural developments in which their actions were embedded. The chapter begins by charting the uptick in early-twentieth-century mobility to other parts of the Chinese empire and to Burma. One outcome was the involvement of Yunnanese merchants in the 1911 revolution against the Qing dynasty. Transnational Yunnanese, many from merchant families, were central to fomenting regime change in western Yunnan, and this helped provoke the rebellion in Kunming, the provincial capital. However, over the long term, cosmopolitan Yunnanese were involved less in national politics than in transforming their hometowns. Over the years, there have been a number of important investigations into how Chinese addressed the perceived crisis of backwardness in the countryside, and those studies initially tended to emphasize intellectuals with national reputations and international degrees, such as Fang Xianting (H. D. Fong) and Yan Yangchu (James Yen).10 But one did not have to be a pedigreed intellectual in order to care about rural reform, and more recent work has included transnational merchants among those who sought to imagine a new future for China. This chapter examines the Yunnanese institutions and ideas for small-town and rural development, which included eradicating opium and gambling, improving the lot of women, encouraging recreation and exercise, and promoting market-oriented sidelines. At the center of it all was a profound dedication to transforming education for boys and girls.11 Driving this desire to educate was an increasing uneasiness with the backwardness of the borderlands. Progressive merchants understood this backwardness to be caused by traditional thought. For progressive Han merchants from Heshun and Tengchong, moreover, backwardness was also endemic to the Kachin and Tai, who lived along the borders. Raised to be self-conscious about the remoteness and diversity of their home regions, Yunnan’s migrant merchants witnessed a time when Asian cities were undergoing major transformations. In contrast, the dusty borderland towns of their childhoods seemed decidedly backward, not the least because of the pig manure everywhere.12 It is unsurprising, of course, that migrants to cities encountered the new and modern. This was, after all, an era of urban transition, when global norms of urban planning took hold around the world.13

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The importance of Yunnanese migrants’ experiences lies not in the experiences themselves, which were not unique, but in the particularities of how Yunnanese merchants interpreted and responded to this newness by trying to transplant it to their hometowns. This process of transplantation could be entirely selfserving. The merchants built luxurious courtyard houses that incorporated architectural or pictorial elements from the world they had found, a process that recalls the contemporary American bourgeoisie and their use of architecture to announce their social preeminence.14 Yunnanese merchants were also making claims to social preeminence and power. However, their social claims were not quite the same as those of their American counterparts. Wealthy Americans set themselves apart by drawing distinctions and defining a new class cohesion based on behavior, networks, and capital.15 In a nation where individualism was encouraged, this process need not be justified in social or national terms. In China, in contrast, the new mercantile rich, led by Shanghai merchants, might don tuxedos and build European-style mansions in ways that mirrored the ostentation of the American bourgeoisie, but they also sought to define their worth in terms of society and the nation.16 The Shanghai experience, while more opulent and concentrated, was comparable to that of other places. In Yunnan, too, new merchants demonstrated their wealth and overseas connections through new architectural forms, clothing, and household items, while also seeking legitimacy through dedication to the progress of the people and nation. They envisioned their contributions as progressives who would modernize the backward peoples of the borderlands. –•– In the nineteenth and very early twentieth centuries, the basics of Yunnan businesses had been laid down: the partnerships, the record keeping, and the disciplining of employees. However, it was from the 1900s through 1930s that some firms exploded in size and reach, completely reconfiguring the spatial experiences of the Yunnanese merchant elite. At this point, their strategy was to expand geographically in order to gain a sort of commercial vertical integration. The successful Yunnan firms sought to establish direct access to valuable commodities, control the transport and simple processing of those goods, and establish branded wholesaling and retailing outlets. During this period of expansion, the industrial world began to influence but not transform Yunnanese business. While Yunnanese had ridden the steamships of the Irrawaddy for a half-century, it was in the 1890s that Mandalay first



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became connected by rail to Rangoon and other towns, and it was 1910 when the Haiphong-Kunming rail line began running. Trains became a central part of Yunnanese merchant life, as did the telegraph. Some Yunnanese silk traders also began experimenting with mechanized reeling and spinning. For the time being, however, these industrial technologies simply intensified business activity by speeding up transport, communications, and the processing of silk. Not until the wartime years would the bigger trading firms begin to transform their companies by looking to invest in industrial manufacturing. The expansion of the Yunnanese trading firms in the first few decades of the twentieth century required some skill and some luck. During this time, the overall southwestern economy was uneven at best: there were bright spots but also uncertainty and change. Using trends in overall trade as a stand-in for aggregate economic data that do not exist, Tim Wright notes impediments to economic development in the Southwest. Currency instability, the silver crisis in 1934–1935, banditry, political instability, and decreased global demand for Chinese silk all had an impact. Some have even suggested that Yunnan’s economy from the 1910s to the 1930s was stagnant.17 For the more successful Yunnanese businessmen and the provincial government, however, the era’s challenges could be overcome, and their key commodities continued to find buyers. In the 1930s, under the weight of the Great Depression, tin exports gradually increased (see table 1 in the appendix). And unlike the rest of the country’s silk merchants, Yunnanese silk exporters continued to find foreign buyers. While this growth was not without its hiccups, Burmese demand for Sichuanese silk, exported via Yunnan, continued to grow, as did overall trade between western China and Burma. From 1911 to 1917, for example, overall trade increased more than 27 percent.18 For silk exports, these increases continued into the 1920s and 1930s (see table 2 in the appendix). One of the reasons seems to have been an increase in the Burmese handicraft weaving industry, first noticed by colonial officials in the early 1920s. This industry primarily used raw silk from Sichuan, which Yunnanese firms imported.19 Although Burma’s colonial government created an import substitution program to cut into the Yunnanese trade, it turned out that the yellow silk from Sichuan was the only available material strong enough to supply the warp for Burmese weavers. (For the weft, they could use cheaper coastal Chinese silk twist imported via Rangoon.)20 The overland Burmese silk trade, dominated by Yunnanese, remained strong into the 1930s. In 1936, for example, 10 percent of all Chinese silk exports went from Sichuan overland to Burma.21

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If we examine these two important commodities, tin and silk, we can understand that there were opportunities for some firms to expand with the growing trade in these and other products. Throughout the first half of the twentieth century, the Southwest remained relatively poor with low per capita incomes, low levels of industrialization, and high reliance on agriculture. Yet at the same time, it was also highly reliant on commerce, including international trade.22 Increasingly, too, Yunnan began to export its labor, particularly to Burma. In 1907, Burma Mines, Ltd. began to exploit the old silver mines in Namtu, looking for lead and silver in the slag heaps left by eighteenth-century Chinese miners. In 1914, the Burma Corporation took over mining operations, and its surveys found large zinc and silver reserves around the old mines. The corporation hired men such as Theodore Hoover, a Stanford graduate and brother of a future American president, to develop the mine, and they had some success. Before the Great War, the mine was annually exporting two thousand tons of zinc-lead ore. One of the mine’s challenges, however, was finding labor, and the corporation turned to Yunnanese workers. While Indians worked at the surface and local Kachin and Shan handled the transport work, it was Yunnanese who extracted and processed the ore.23 As was customary, however, most Yunnanese considered mining a seasonal occupation, and the Burma Corporation found it difficult to keep its miners on permanently. Typically the men arrived at the start of the dry season (December) and left before the rains came in May, preferring to walk the several hundred miles to return home for the planting season—and to avoid Burma’s tropical summer.24 By 1922, perhaps five thousand Yunnanese were making these seasonal treks, and they hailed from as far away as Dali.25 As the migration of Yunnanese labor to Burma increased, it provided new opportunities for Yunnan firms to profit. The firms already moved large sums of cash back and forth across the border, including for the British consul in Tengchong.26 Now, the laborers came to rely on merchant firms to remit their wages to Yunnan, something the firms did through increasingly elaborate financial networks linking Mandalay and Rangoon to Kunming via Hong Kong and Shanghai. Of course, the remittance services were open to more than just workers; smaller businesses could use them too.27 While remittance services served as one source of working capital, the firms also expanded their access to credit. It was in 1915 that British colonial officials first recognized that Yunnanese merchants were opening lines of credit with Hong Kong and Shanghai banks.28 And at some point in the 1930s, if not earlier, Yongchangxiang’s Mandalay branch began doing business with the



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Oversea-Chinese Bank (Huaqiao yinhang), founded in 1919 by Hokkien expatriate merchants.29 Access to credit did not always require access to modern banking services, however. In Burma, some firms relied on the moneylending services of Indian businessmen, particularly from the Chettiar caste. When trade went bad, sometimes the unpaid loans meant bankruptcy. In the early 1920s, when the silk trade briefly declined because of an unfavorable exchange rate, two Tengchong firms found themselves owing a combined 1.6 million rupees to Chettiar firms, and at least one Chettiar lender arrived in Tengchong in an effort to get his money back.30 The corporations that stayed solvent saw firm capital and profits increase into the 1930s, even during the global Depression. Yongchangxiang’s equity capital increased from 32,381 yuan in 1917 to over 1.8 million yuan in 1937.31 Nominally, the increase in equity capital was over fifty-fold, but taking into account the Yunnan currency’s loss of value, Yang Kecheng estimated that the real value increased thirty times. In connection with rising capital and profits, Yongchangxiang began to extend its geographical reach by investing in permanent branches far from its base in Dali. The firm sent a number of men to Sichuan in order to establish a permanent presence in the silk-producing regions and the large cities. Yang Runxin, for example, served in Sichuan from 1912 to 1947, helping the firm establish branches in Chengdu, Chongqing, and Jiading.32 Other Yunnan firms also found the silk trade to be profitable. Fuchunheng first became involved in buying, transporting, and selling raw silk (tiaosi), but in 1918, it sent Ye Xinliang to Jiading to establish its first silk reeling mill, and he would eventually set up over a dozen such mills. According to Shi Cilu, the firm began to invest in mechanized silk reeling machinery—something that Yang Kecheng also claims that Yongchangxiang pursued. According to Yang, Yongchangxiang produced spun silk (fangsi), and to accomplish this, it established some basic mechanized workshops in Jiading.33 Based on some of the fragmentary pieces of evidence still available, Shi Cilu’s and Yang Kecheng’s memories are plausible.34 Yunnan entrepreneurs apparently began to experiment with mechanization, but there is no evidence that they were bent on becoming industrialists. Nevertheless, they were willing to layer new technologies onto their existing practices, and some of these technologies, such as the telegraph, became central to their operations. To make the telegraph a successful communications tool, the firms developed elaborate coding procedures in order to send efficient, inexpensive communications about pricing, quantity, and shipments.35

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As the successful western Yunnan firms expanded into Sichuan, they also began to move into Kunming. Yongchangxiang moved its headquarters there in 1927. A survey in 1928 found that it was one of 139 Dali-area firms operating in Kunming. There were also sixty-one Heqing firms and twenty Tengchong firms. For comparison, there were also twenty Shanghai firms and forty-five Guangdong and Guangxi firms.36 The Yunnan firms’ expansion followed the money and markets. Silk drew them to Sichuan, the railroad and finance to Kunming, and cotton (and the railroad) brought the largest of them, Maoheng, to Vietnam, where it was represented by the Yeck-Cheong (Yichang) firm on Hanoi’s Rue Chinoise.37 Maoheng was a particularly dynamic firm. After being created through the merger of two small partnerships in 1928, it grew to have twenty-three investors with a total of 1,554,349.81 yuan invested by 1939. Headquarters were in Kunming, but there were branches in Mandalay, India, Vietnam, multiple towns in Yunnan, Chongqing, Xufu (Yibin), Chengdu, and Jianchang (Xikang).38 At the time of Maoheng’s founding, Wang Shaoyan was made managing director, and he moved to Kunming, from where he could travel to and from various branches.39 Important managers were sent as well to Mandalay (Dong Yuanting and Wang Zhenyu) and later to Rangoon (Yang Yuliu) and India.40 Other firms also sought lucrative opportunities through international expansion. The Tengchong firm Hongshengxiang invested in sulfur mining in the Dali area, and when it incorporated in 1935, it already had branches in Shanghai, Hong Kong, Rangoon, and India.41 Mobility exposed these men to new ideas and experiences. In 1910, the narrow-gauge French-financed rail came to link Kunming with Haiphong’s port. For many wealthy Chinese, including Yunnanese students and businessmen, this train was the route to Hong Kong, eastern China, and even Europe and North America. With the railroads came new architectural forms—British and French-inspired architecture at the train stations—which would also have an important impact on merchant thinking (see figure 9). In Kunming, these new transportation technologies and architectural forms included the Frenchinspired train station. By 1919, when the municipal government was initiating urban renewal that brought down the old gates and pushed wide, paved boulevards through the southern part of the city, foreigners and wealthy Chinese built new townhouses and villas incorporating French architectural flourishes. As in other Chinese cities, urban renewal was paralleled by new opportunities for consumption (the department store) and leisure (the movie theater).42



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FIGURE 9.   The

Bisezhai train station. Stations like this reflected new architectural forms introduced to Yunnan. S ou rc e : Photograph by the author.

When the literary critic Li Changzhi lived in Kunming during the 1930s, the southern part of the city reminded him of Shanghai’s French Concession.43 As these changes took place in Kunming, the western Yunnan merchants stationed there witnessed them and brought some of these architectural innovations back home with them, albeit in a creolized form. For merchants in the late Qing and early Republican periods, it was a given that they would build courtyard mansions in their hometowns. Overseas Chinese entrepreneurs, Shanghai millionaires, and borderlands Yunnanese merchants all represented their wealth in dwellings that they themselves might rarely use. In this way, Yunnanese merchants were no exception. In 1910, Zhu Chaoying, whose money came from the tin mines in Gejiu and who was a Japanese-educated rebel against the Qing in 1911, completed his famous 218-room courtyard home in Jianshui (Lin’an) which is still known as the “Daguanlou of Yunnan,” named after the famous fictional Jia family mansion in the Story of the Stone. In nearby Tuanshan Village, there are more courtyard mansions built with new-found wealth in the late Qing and early Republic.44

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As merchants traveled and spent more time in Kunming, Mandalay, Shanghai, and Hong Kong, they increasingly integrated elements of the wider world into their houses. The former muleteer Yan Zizhen, one of the founders of the Yongchangxiang firm, built his multicourtyard mansion that faithfully reflected many of the ideals of local Minjia architecture,45 but also had a towering (by local standards) building designed to imitate European architecture. It is also said that Yan included a Western-style toilet in the house (though I could not find it when I visited in 2012).46 And we already know that Yan Zizhen’s son, Baocheng, built his expansive courtyard house on a grander scale than his father’s house, and his European dwelling (yanglou) is particularly elegant. There were others in Xizhou too. One of Xizhou’s most successful entrepreneurs, Dong Dengnong, also combined Minjia and European architecture when building a new house in 1942. By this time, Dong had more or less seen it all. As a boy, he had lost his father but was able to enter his uncle’s firm as an apprentice. Later he accumulated enough capital to start his own firm. He became involved in a wide range of commercial ventures, including exporting marble via Haiphong and trading opium. Still later, after a stint in jail related to a business failure, Dong hit the jackpot with wolfram and tungsten mining. Back in his hometown, he built a French-inspired villa that was linked to his Minjia-designed courtyard house.47 In addition to combining local and imported architectural styles, what made these houses into statements about cosmopolitanism were the murals that adorned the courtyard walls. In the 1940s, it was still possible to see paintings of European buildings, trains, and steamers incorporated into the designs on Xizhou house walls. For Francis Hsu, these paintings indicated the traditional nature of the men who commissioned them. They were, he notes, “merely attempts to enhance the owner’s prestige in the traditional way, not to change their traditional scheme.”48 But if we note that these murals were not only part of a pattern of representing cosmopolitan experiences for the sake of prestige, but were also linked to a larger set of experiences that led some merchants to radically remake village education and cultural life, then it becomes hard to accept that the murals meant so little. The Xizhou merchants were not the only ones to represent foreign or modern iconography on their courtyard mansion walls. This was also done in Heshun, where one 1920s house still preserves its paintings of cars and a train (see figure 10). For some of the Heshun merchants, their engagement with the outside world was central to who they were and to what they hoped Heshun might



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FIGURE 10.   A

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train mural on a courtyard wall.

S ou rc e : Photograph by the author.

become. As an old man, for example, the wealthy merchant Cun Haiting posed for a photograph that would later be used to commemorate him in death. In it, he wore a coat, tie, and leather shoes—the uniform of the cosmopolitan man (see figure 11).49 For the expanding Yunnanese firms, the move to Mandalay was particularly crucial in terms of commercial opportunity and exposure to new ideas. From the late nineteenth century, there was a significant uptick in Chinese emigration to Burma. British colonial sources record a dramatic increase in the Chinese population, from 12,962 in 1881 to 122,834 in 1911. By 1931, 193,594 Chinese were in Burma.50 Chinese migrants, moreover, became engaged in a broad range of economic activities across a broad geographical expanse. As the colonial government of Burma Province completed its 1901 census, it reported that the total of Chinese in the Province is an ever-growing one. . . . As merchants and traders the Chinese have established themselves firmly in all the commercial centres, while as petty contractors and carpenters they supply a much felt want throughout the length and breadth of the Province.51

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FIGURE 11.   Cun

Haiting.

S ou rce: Chongxinhui wu zhounian tekan (1931).

While the number of Chinese residents in Burma increased rapidly, it is impossible to know how many of these were Yunnanese as opposed to Cantonese or Hokkien. However, the census takers noted that Yunnanese congregated in the north, from Mandalay to Bhamo, and that some areas frequented by Yunnanese—the Ruby Mines and Bhamo in particular—had populations that were increasing at rates of 90 to 157 percent.52 At the same time, exports from Burma to western China were also on the rise in terms of both value and volume, and since Yunnanese merchants controlled most of this trade, this suggests an



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increasing Yunnanese merchant activity in Burma too.53 But statistics reveal little about the changes taking place in the minds of the increasingly mobile merchant men and boys. Coming from communities that promoted mobility and encountering new experiences while abroad, two generations of Yunnanese merchants would turn those experiences into the motivation to transform China. To learn about these men, it is perhaps best to start with the man in the photo in figure 11, Cun Haiting. –•– Cun Haiting was born in Heshun in 1855, and he would die a very wealthy man on the other side of China, in Shanghai, in 1925. It was the end of a long and extraordinary life. Cun left Heshun in his early teens, probably about 1870 or so, and headed for Burma’s gem mining district, where he learned and earned enough to start his own business. When the British invaded Upper Burma in 1885, it is said that Cun had the gumption to intervene on behalf of the Chinese, asking for protection of lives and property. It was the beginning of a career of political activity that increasingly became focused not on Burma but China. In the years after the failed Hundred Days Reform in 1898, Cun became active in seeking solutions for China’s future. He entertained the great reformer Kang Youwei, who advocated for a constitutional monarchy in China, at the Yunnanese temple in Mandalay, but he was not a royalist like some Chinese in Burma. Instead, like other merchants, he became a supporter of Sun Yat-sen’s revolutionary republican ideas, and after a branch of the Revolutionary Alliance was established in Rangoon in 1908, Cun and other Yunnanese joined with Hokkien and Cantonese radicals to form cells in Bhamo and Mandalay. There, they established a cover organization, the Rising Han Book Association (Zhen Han shubaoshe), and Cun used his wealth to support the alliance’s efforts to provoke revolution in Yunnan.54 It is well known that some Yunnanese were drawn to Sun Yatsen’s revolutionary ideas and that several dozen Yunnanese joined the Revolutionary Alliance in Tokyo. These young people had experienced Anglo-French efforts to monopolize mineral-rich Yunnan’s mining rights as well as the building of the French-controlled railroad linking Vietnam with Yunnan.55 While English-language scholarship has tended to label these students and other activists as gentry and military men, Donald Sutton has noted the importance of merchants to the political and ideological changes taking place.56 If we follow up on this

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insight, we can begin to note how transnational merchant networks contributed to the Tengchong uprising against the Qing, one of the earliest uprisings to follow the outbreak of revolution in central China. The transborder merchant networks in Yunnan provided some from Heshun and Tengchong with troubling information about the world around them. Having witnessed the British invasion of Upper Burma in the 1880s, these individuals understood imperialist power, and they were concerned when reforms in Beijing failed in 1898 and even more upset when the Boxer uprising led to foreign invasion in North China. Convinced that new thinking was absolutely necessary, a group of Heshun men created the Modern Study Society (Xianxinshe).57 The Xianxinshe Group included merchants’ sons, such as Li Jingshan and Li Renjie, whose fathers and brothers worked in Burma. The Lis were concerned about imperialism, including China’s loss of Taiwan, as well as the French and British railroad and mining rights in Yunnan. Other men who joined the Xianxinshe also had experience abroad and a concern for China’s future. With help from Cun Haiting, the Lis and the Modern Study Society established a reading room in Heshun, where people could access the revolutionary works of prominent Chinese thinkers, including Yan Fu, Zou Rong, and Chen Tianhua.58 The two Lis and their colleagues in the society moved from discussions of Zou’s and Chen’s ideas on to the thought of Sun Yat-sen and Huang Xing, deepening their commitment to revolution.59 Thus, the ideas of revolution and the Revolutionary Alliance reached into western Yunnan through the money and offspring of the merchant families. As locals began to join Cun Haiting, Li Jingshan, and Li Renjie in the Revolutionary Alliance, they tended to include people like Li Xueshi, who came from a trading family and had spent parts of his youth in Burma.60 Not all of the local revolutionaries were from Han merchant families, however, as is seen in the case of one of the better-known members of the alliance, Dao Anren. Dao might seem an unlikely progressive figure: he was the Tai saopha of Ganyai, a Tai principality near Tengchong. But Ganyai had a history as a major stop on the caravan trade routes, and like others on the border regions, Dao understood the importance of trade. He made trips to India and Singapore to learn about the rubber industry and helped import rubber trees. He also studied in Japan, where he joined the alliance, and he supported young Tai to study in Japan.61 For Dao, exposure to international ideas led him to think about developing not only the rubber industry but also silk production, from planting mulberries and raising silkworms to creating a silk reeling factory. He hired technicians to advise on



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silk developments, and with his anti-Qing activism, he provoked the provincial government into keeping a careful watch on him, particularly because he sought to resist Qing state-building initiatives in the borderlands.62 As we begin to reconstruct the backgrounds and networks of a few of the Tengchong region’s revolutionaries, it becomes clearer why the 1911 Revolution in Yunnan started in the Tengchong region, was led by one jade merchant (Zhang Wenguang), supported financially by another (Cun Haiting), and introduced into Tai communities by an aristocrat with an eye for economic development (Dao Anren). It was also, says Donald Sutton, “in its spontaneity, popular involvement, and ideology, the most authentically revolutionary response in Yunnan.”63 This was a region that produced people who had been exposed to new ideas and new ways of doing things. The men who imported revolutionary ideas reached out to a broad array of compatriots and, unlike the Yunnan Army in Kunming, which followed Tengchong’s lead in rising against the Qing, the Tengchong revolutionaries were not committed to a hierarchical military takeover.64 The reconstruction of these earlier networks reveals that by the early 1900s, some Yunnanese emigrant merchants were not only exposed to new ideas but were creating institutions to act on them. Networks of traders in Burma interacted with global and Chinese ideas, and the strengthening of these networks fostered an environment in which new ideas were absorbed, adapted to local understandings, and then translated into institutions designed to change China. In the years after the 1911 revolution, some Yunnanese merchants became even more committed to changing China by starting with their hometowns and villages. Their work was influenced by their experiences in Burma as well as the legacy of the Revolutionary Alliance generation, and their story reveals the important ways in which the Southwest was being transformed in the early twentieth century. –•– To understand how the growing expatriate Yunnanese merchant community in Burma would seek to change Southwest China, it is helpful to start with a 1925 survey of the Chinese in Burma, the Huaqiao baojian, a fascinating document that reveals the sheer numbers and widespread distribution of Yunnanese.65 The source surveys Chinese institutions, whether Cantonese, Hokkien, or Yunnanese, that were found throughout Burma’s cities, towns, and smaller populated places, and it illuminates how business and community institutions were intertwined. In the larger towns, Yunnanese merchants participated in pan-

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Chinese organizations, such as merchants’ associations (huiguan). For example, a Chinese merchants’ association (called the Zhonghua huiguan) in Mandalay was led by the dean of the Yunnanese merchants, Cun Haiting. The association’s vice directors were the Cantonese Wu Yuren, whose brother ran the local Cantonese school, and Lu Baoren, who was presumably Hokkien. The Huaqiao baojian survey emphasized that the association included men from all three provinces and that the relations among them were cordial.66 Thus, on one level, the migrants from Canton, Fujian, and Yunnan had developed ways to interact as a Chinese community by modifying the earlier practice of creating merchant associations. This was common in many places where Chinese migrants from different backgrounds gathered.67 At the same time, migrants to Burma created new institutions that advanced ideas of exclusive provincial identities while simultaneously creating opportunities to participate in global and pan-Chinese movements. One such opportunity involved education. As Chinese migration to Burma increased, it coincided with the colonial government’s rapid expansion of the Burmese education system. The new schools provided more access to both vernacular (instruction in Burmese) and Anglo-vernacular (instruction in Burmese with English also taught) schools. Girls were encouraged to attend, and their enrollments rose from 74,753 in 1911 to 219,549 in 1931.68 According to government analysis, Chinese migrants sent their children to these schools (and also to private religious schools) and were often satisfied, suggesting that many Chinese migrants accepted new educational opportunities even though they promoted acculturation.69 As public education became more accessible, particularly for girls, it brought into sharp relief for other Chinese the importance of identity, language, and race. This was especially true for some merchants. Writing in a special family edition of the Tengchong Expatriate Monthly (Lu Mian Tengqiao yuekan), one author criticized the men who married Burmese women and allowed their children to acculturate to Burmese ways. The fathers were, it was argued, “largely ignoring the concept of race” (duiyu zhongzu guannian, duoban hushi) by allowing the children, especially girls who had fewer opportunities for Chinese schooling, to remain ignorant of Chinese ways. The solution, it was concluded, was for Yunnanese to provide Chinese schooling for Yunnanese children in Burma.70 This desire to provide Chinese schooling for migrant children was shaped by a growing discourse about race, nationalism, and identity that emerged from the context of colonial schooling in Burma, but other contexts were influential too. One of these was the long-term discussion of education reform among



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Chinese, both in China and abroad. By the 1920s, as Yunnanese merchants were well aware, school reform had been debated in China for at least two generations. In 1895, after the traumatic defeat to Japan, Liang Qichao made his famous call for an empire-wide school system, a call that would have an impact on Yunnanese merchant towns. Beginning in 1902, the Qing court issued sweeping regulations for establishing a new school system.71 After the fall of the Qing in 1911, there continued to be new reform initiatives as the new Republican government rebuilt the school system, seeking to design schools to train citizens, not subjects. The classics were removed from the curriculum while lab work and other subjects were newly emphasized. At the same time, schooling for girls was emphasized.72 As the national school system emerged, there were efforts to centralize oversight in the Education Ministry while also providing lower jurisdictions with local control.73 As China’s new education system emerged, then, local structures of power were influential in shaping educational opportunities. Education was expensive, and private money often determined which communities built schools and influenced how those schools’ curricula developed. In Xiamen, many schools were founded and funded by Hokkien who had made money overseas.74 In Zhejiang, Rob Culp’s careful study reveals how more industrialized, commercialized areas developed an education system fueled by commercial capital and reformist ideas, while in less developed areas, lineages continued to dominate the founding of primary schools.75 In Yunnan, important educational differences emerged from place to place, based not only on levels of commercialization, but also on access to international networks and developing conceptions of race and nationalism. In other words, as Culp noted, the local structure of the economy mattered, but so too did other factors. As in Zhejiang, the commercially advanced trade towns were the first to create new primary schools, and this process was, even in areas dominated by non-Han communities, influenced by local elites, especially merchants. By the end of the Qing, there were five public primary schools that offered upper primary instruction in the Dali region, all of them in the areas where merchants dominated.76 The time line and patterns of schooling in Dali and Xizhou, where the Minjia merchant elite were influential, seem to roughly approximate those in other important trade towns, such as Lijiang, where the Naxi elite tended to dominate, and Tengchong/Heshun, where Han and Hui elites presided. Thus, elite Minjia and Naxi, living in relatively commercially advanced towns like Lijiang

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and Dali, had more access to and control over schools than other non-Han indigenous communities. In other areas, especially regions bordering Burma and Laos, the state took the lead in establishing primary schools.77 This was conceived as a nation-building initiative that was crucial to stabilizing vulnerable border regions where leaders like Dao Anren were under suspicion. It was also a decision that clearly separated Yunnanese by race and region as the state claimed the authority to transform the poorer non-Han borders while elite merchants, including non-Han elite who presented as Han, had the authority and resources to take the lead in their own hometowns and, in the case of Heshun and Tengchong merchants, contribute to state efforts to educate and assimilate borderlands communities. In the predominantly Tai areas west and south of Tengchong, for example, members of the Modern Study Society, such as Li Renjie and Li Yuegai, soon joined the state in establishing schools for indigenous Tai.78 Later, in the 1930s and 1940s, the state would seek to expand control over education in the borderlands,79 a process that, as we will see, continued to be supported by Yunnan’s Han merchants, who, despite the work of men like Dao Anren, also looked down on the Tai and yet envied their regional political power. As transnational merchants became involved in education in both Yunnan and Burma, they engaged with the interrelated ideas of race, acculturation, and modernity. In the Tengchong region, the early emphasis in modern schools was, following the work of educators like Li Jingshan, implementing a new curriculum (xinxue or xinxuezhi) that included Western natural sciences and English language instruction. In Burma, where the establishment of Chinese schools tended to follow provincial lines, prominent Yunnan merchants in Mandalay created the Changhua or Chan Wan Chinese School, which also adopted the new curriculum, taught in National Language (Mandarin).80 This is important because the men running the school were clearly differentiating their curriculum from traditional ones, which also existed in some Chinese schools in Burma. Instead of a Confucian education, the Chan Wan Chinese School provided students with training in history, natural sciences, biology, Chinese language, and English. Such a curriculum was modern and yet taught in Mandarin, thus providing students with a strong foundation in Chinese language and culture. In Mandalay, the merchants backing the Yunnanese school were powerful, wealthy, and linked to progressive ideas of modern education for boys and girls. The school’s general manager (zongli) was Cun Haiting, the old jade merchant



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and former revolutionary. The school’s principal was from Heqing, another important trade town, and he oversaw the actual running of the school, which had twenty-six students in 1925, three of them girls. The school’s finances were managed by Yongchangxiang, the major trading firm from Xizhou.81 With natives of Xizhou, Heshun, and Heqing involved in the school, it was clear that Yunnanese from across the province had a voice in the Mandalay school and that key firms from the merchant community supported the school’s finances. This cooperation in Burma helps us to understand why merchants from both Heshun and Xizhou, whose hometowns were distant from each other, would push for similar educational and cultural reforms at home. Yunnanese merchants who became involved in education reform were influenced by a number of factors, including the expansion of colonial Burma’s school system, the transformation of education at home, and the creation of Hokkien schools abroad. Progressive Yunnanese came to admire the Hokkien schools in Burma, but they also opposed any schools that were “old style” (gudongshi) and lacking in new curriculum or coeducational opportunities.82 This would lead to conflicts in Burma and Yunnan. Although some of the leading merchants and firms in Mandalay were supporting modern schooling and the new curriculum, other Yunnanese supported traditional schools.83 Back in the Tengchong region, moreover, there arose a vigorous effort to reinstate traditional schooling. –•– When the Burma-based merchant communities were busy implementing a new-style school for their children in Mandalay, some of their members began to absorb ideas from the May Fourth Movement. In 1921, young Heshun expatriates in Mandalay formed the Youth Association (Qingnian hui). Their colleagues in Mohnyin were moved to form a similar organization, which they called the Progress Association (Cujinhui). By 1925, leaders in both Burma towns had developed a common program for combining their organizations into a single entity, which they ultimately called the Heshun Chongxin (Sublime and New) Association.84 The association would quickly become a leader in trying to transform Heshun township. One of its major projects was education, which they placed into a larger context of changing society as a whole. The Heshun merchant activists were not alone. Far-flung natives of Tengchong also developed the New Tengchong Society (Xin Tengchong she), which included a journal (Xin Tengchong) initially edited in Beijing and distributed in Shanghai,

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Kunming, Tengchong, and Mandalay.85 Later, a new journal was developed in Mandalay, and despite its full title, Lu Mian Tengqiao yuekan, which seemed to target Tengchong expatriates in Burma, it was circulated to Tengchong community members in China’s major cities (Shanghai, Beijing, Nanjing); in Tokyo; in the key trade towns of Yunnan; and in key commercial areas of Burma, including Rangoon and Mandalay.86 The New Tengchong Society also developed programs for political and social activism in Tengchong. In addition, people who hailed from Xizhou developed the New Xizhou movement, with a journal published by a merchant in Shanghai, while important merchants from Yongchangxiang and other companies that traded in Burma were involved in building new schools and a local medical clinic. We therefore see a pattern of efforts by mobile Yunnanese business elites to transform their hometowns. Formed in Burma, the Chongxin Association attracted dozens and then hundreds of members all around Burma, Yunnan, and farther field, including Japan. The association was designed to attract members from both sexes, and among the twenty-six officers in 1931, three were women.87 Most members were merchants, but others were students or teachers. Based on the writing in their journals, most members were clearly aware of Chinese and global developments and saw themselves and their home community in larger perspectives. They self-consciously identified with radical Chinese reformers, describing their efforts as a “small-scale May Fourth Movement.” Like the early May Fourth activists, they targeted educational and cultural backwardness as major enemies and quickly developed plans to remake Heshun’s educational and cultural infrastructure.88 At the same time, the members of the Chongxin and other expatriate organizations revealed a global vision shaped by experiences in Burma and elsewhere. In their publications, the Chongxin Association could not conceal an anxious concern for Heshun’s tendency to lag behind global changes.89 There was a fear of not keeping up, fed by events in Burma, where the issues of education, rural reform, and national autonomy were intensifying in the years surrounding the creation of the Chongxin, New Tengchong, and New Xizhou groups. In particular, by 1924, Burmese activists were promoting independence and rural reform by establishing movements at the village level, thus linking national strength with rural reform.90 Clearly the Yunnanese followed these events, including major anti-imperialist movements such as the Saya San uprising that affected much of Burma between 1930 and 1932.91 Organizations such as the New Tengchong Society also sought to build a broad network of outposts



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throughout rural villages, including its Tai villages to the west and south of Tengchong Town.92 And it is also instructive that the Yunnanese activists emphasized bottom-up change, starting with their hometowns. While Yunnanese in Burma witnessed the rise of new forms of Burmese activism, they were conscious of earlier Yunnanese contributions to revolution. The Chongxin Association identified with radical former revolutionaries, including Cun Haiting, who was honored with a posthumous dedication at the beginning of the 1931 Chongxin Association journal, and Li Jingshan, who also earned a dedication in the journal. There was thus an effort to develop a revolutionary pedigree while simultaneously dedicating the association to correcting the perceived failures of the 1911 generation. The Chongxin Association was highly critical of their elders in general, with the editor of the 1931 journal suggesting that despite an original commitment to reform (weixin), the 1911 generation had more recently turned away from progressivism, even as education and society deteriorated.93 The expatriates who returned home to visit often had nothing good to say. One lamented, “The opium dens are everywhere, the gambling nests are like trees in a forest.” Echoing, perhaps intentionally, the Yangwendun, he found his home to be a place of wasteful consumption, where the neglect of proper child rearing caused children to “turn from pure and innocent into spoilt and naughty.” The need for education reform, he thought, was desperate. Earlier efforts to implement the new curriculum in schools had been reversed. The middle school had only one decent teacher, and social science education was lacking. The oppression of girls, moreover, was widespread: he reported that only one in ten girls over the age of fifteen had natural feet.94 If, in the late nineteenth century, when the Yangwendun was first copied and circulated, Burma was conceived of as a land of corruption and vice while the hometown, Heshun, was a place that anchored mobile boys and men, then the tables had been turned. Heshun was now the dark place that required the men and women from abroad to come home and provide light. In response to this darkness of chaotic decadence, the Chongxin Association promised, literally, “a type of wide-ranging Enlightenment,” a “Renaissance” (with Renaissance written in roman script). The association proposed to lead a political movement for change in the local deliberative assembly (xiang yihui) and a cultural movement to reform the educational system. They began to plan for a library and a lecture series that would include advice on how to improve the economy. The movement would counter the 1911 generation who

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once sought reform but now presided over a reactionary society. The source of the Enlightenment and the new revolution would come from the “progressive” (jinbu) Heshun residents living in Burma.95 To do this, the Chongxin Association created a substantial organization, divided among “internal” (in Heshun) and “external” (in Burma and other countries) sections, with the external section often formulating policy and the Heshun section seeking to implement it.96 The association was governed by general regulations that, though often amended, had established a centralized administration combined with annual meetings at each level of the organization by 1931. At each level of governance, there was also an executive committee and a representative council. Committee members were to be selected by anonymous vote. The large policy issues, such as changes in the association’s organization or decisions to try to transform the Heshun government, were taken up at the annual meetings of the entire association and, after deliberation, voted up or down.97 Specific divisions of the organization—on propaganda, organization, accounting, and women’s affairs—were devoted to running the association and implementing policies. Within the Heshun section, there were divisions devoted to agriculture, the economy, statistics, law, sanitation, and education.98 It was articulated at least once—although this was certainly implied in most of the association’s literature—that the Chongxin Association “represented Heshun’s people” (shi daibiao Heshun minzhong de), despite the fact that its center of power was in Burma.99 The concerns of the Chongxin Association were shared by the New Tengchong Society. Like the Heshun activists, those from Tengchong sought direct input from local residents through visits to Tengchong and letters to the society’s journals. In 1930, one such letter was sent by a woman who had been recruited by the society’s Association for the Advancement of Women. “I am taking the liberty to write your esteemed society,” she wrote. “I write the truth and ask that your esteemed society help me initiate a discussion. . . . Although I won’t profit personally, perhaps [my story] can save our women.” She then went on to chronicle how she was sacrificed to an oppressive society, writing in excruciating detail about foot binding and being pulled from school in order to enter an arranged marriage. The marriage failed because she and her husband could not build an intimate relationship within an extended family, and he soon left for Burma, only to marry a Burmese wife. He would not come home, and in the past few years, the woman had been trying to capitalize on her limited education to find work to support her daughter. She signed



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her letter “Orchid” and posted it from Tengchong.100 The editor responded to Orchid with a condemnation of traditional marriage practices as oppressive, including the idea that married couples could not be friends—or walk down the street together. (The editor recalled that he once walked with his wife in Tengchong, only to be ridiculed by people on the street.) He stressed that the New Tengchong Society sought to address issues of family, gender, education, and the need for progress. Linked to the issues of women’s health and treatment were the central focus of New Tengchong and Chongxin: education and eradicating old customs. New Tengchong leaders highlighted what they saw as the worthlessness of a Confucian education. In their August 1931 journal, they featured an article by an outof-work middle school graduate who explained how he had been “deselected” (taotai) by society because Tengchong Middle School did not train him for the twentieth century. Instead, he was taught by teachers such as a Mr. K, who encouraged his students to study classical essays while ignoring the sciences and English. This man felt that he had lost his chance to “become a leader, helping the people to advance,” and he found that he could not even hold down a job as an elementary teacher because the math and sciences were too difficult for him.101 The issue of classical studies became a major arena for struggle. In Heshun and Tengchong, there were men who wished to bring classical learning back into the schools, thus overturning the curricular reforms of the early twentieth century.102 The merchants of Burma who tended to dominate both the Chongxin Association and the New Tengchong Society were engaged in a power struggle, trying to assert their vision of the future at home. Unlike the Hokkien merchants who endorsed Confucian modernization in Xiamen’s schools,103 progressive Yunnanese opposed the revival of the ancient (fugu) in local schools. This was because they identified Confucian education with a lack of progress that they blamed on the 1911 generation, some of whom were also members of a redemptive society, the Tongshanshe.104 The Tongshanshe was one of the redemptive societies that spread in early twentieth-century China. These societies were a diverse group of organizations, but in many areas, including the Tengchong region, they came to be politically powerful. They combined various Chinese traditions—Buddhist, Confucian, Daoist—and recruited members from all walks of life.105 The Tongshanshe was one of the largest societies, claiming 30 million members by 1929. It originated in Sichuan but spread into Yunnan, developing for its adepts a method of selfcultivation and establishing schools for traditional learning (guoxue).106 To gain

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control over the schools, the progressive merchants had to fight against the Tongshanshe and proponents of classical learning. The Yunnanese progressives did recognize the importance of a Chinese education, something that they stressed for their children in Burma, lest they become acculturated to Burmese ways. Acculturation was described as a loss of Chineseness, caused by exposure to people of other races (yizu). One expression that reveals the fears and prejudices associated with acculturation was the term “fall into another race” (luowei yizu), which was applied to children who acculturated.107 To provide both a new curriculum education while also making that education Chinese, the Chongxin Association turned to Ministry of Education textbooks, which they tried to keep in the schools. I was able to examine several of the elementary texts that had been used in Heshun during the 1920s and 1930s, which are now in a local personal collection.108 One textbook is a 1917 version of the Commercial Press’s Republic Textbook: New National Literature, which was approved by the Ministry of Education. The text provides a fascinating compilation of brief descriptions of human societies, from the global to the national to the familial; important new political concepts such as republicanism and freedom; national heroes such as Yue Fei, who had fought nomadic peoples in the North; basic cultural topics such as music; and important lessons about the failure of Qing foreign policy. Newer texts were also introduced that equipped elementary school students to become national citizens by providing basic introductions to the Republican flag and the concept of nationalism. Students were taught simple songs such as “The Nationalism Song” (Aiguo ge), which starts off, “My country, my family, my country-family (guojia) is China.” With their growing promotion of progressive nationalism and their fears of acculturation in Burma, the merchants of Heshun endorsed Chinese education not just for the Han children of their hometown, but also for the Tai and Kachin (Jingpo) of nearby borderlands communities. They argued that education would help the “wild people” (Yeren, a pejorative for the Kachin) to overcome mistrust of the Han. They also argued that Chinese education would help to “evolve” (jinhua) the Kachin away from their violent ways, making them more like the Kachin of Burma, who had been changed by the British colonial schools and put to productive use as soldiers defending the Burmese borders. Thus, through their experiences in Burma and their concerns for their hometowns, Han merchants became involved in the explosive issues of race



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and education in Yunnan. The merchant-reformers of Heshun and Tengchong criticized the politics of the borderlands, where aristocratic Tai like Fang Kesheng inherited power with government approval. The Chongxin Association argued that it was “inappropriate for a nation organized under the principles of popular sovereignty” to recognize such privilege, and they urged policies of education and development designed to change Tai ways to integrate them more into the nation.109 This type of argument grew out of an understanding of race and identity that was simplistic but powerful. In Burma, one could “fall into another race” in the school systems that promoted acculturation. While this was anathema to some merchants, they had no qualms about applying the same type of logic to their Tai and Kachin neighbors in western Yunnan. But the Tai aristocrats who were the objects of merchant criticism shared similar experiences with elite merchant youth. Some of them also had been educated in the Heshun and Tengchong schools; others had been educated in Burmese schools, where they too were exposed to new ways of thinking about progress, race, and nationalism. This led the Tai elite to not necessarily see acculturation to Han ways as a desirable future, and, in the 1930s, as we will see, Tai leaders resisted the efforts of the Yunnan provincial government to impose new forms of control on their lands. Dao Anren’s son Dao Baotu (aka Dao Jingban) would fend off violent government efforts to impose its authority, and during the postwar period, he would become interested in creating an autonomous Tai region, modeled on the Burmese Shan States.110 Because of the transnational nature of Yunnanese life, the ideas of race and nationalism were increasingly becoming sites of disagreement. If the Chongxin Association was unsuccessful in helping the state make compliant citizens out of the Tai and Kachin, it had much greater success in transforming Heshun by creating new ways of being Yunnanese, Chinese, and modern all at the same time. To do this, the association elected an Education Commission—an activist group bent on gaining control of the schools.111 The commission was tasked with developing a new curriculum in which teachers would undermine old superstitions. This meant that they would seek to centralize administration, introduce new textbooks and curricula, and secure funding for the schools.112 Over the course of the 1920s and 1930s, the Chongxin Association and its Education Commission were quite successful in many respects, though the details of their political victories have yet to be recovered.

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Although the Pacific War disrupted business life in Burma, the association had already helped to recreate the Heshun school system by the early 1940s. The elementary system came to have two schools, up to eighty teachers, and— at its peak—one thousand enrolled students. For elementary school students, each day offered learning in the classroom as well as playing on the associationdesigned and -funded playgrounds with slides, seesaws, and other apparatus. The Heshun and Tengchong progressives endorsed physical activity, including playing and dancing, as well as important skills such as self-motivation.113 The association also contributed to the creation of the private Yiqun Middle school, which, in addition to conforming to Ministry of Education curricular standards, also offered Burmese and English language classes. The association also tried to provide equipment and texts that were up to date—even arranging for imported lab equipment when necessary.114 While the redesign of the school system was impressive, the best-remembered accomplishment of the Chongxin Association was the Heshun Library, first imagined in the late 1920s but not completed until 1938. Opening with over sixty thousand volumes to lend, the library was made possible by two thousand contributions from Burma-based merchants. It sought to provide broad access: a children’s reading room targeted Heshun’s younger residents, and an international news service was run by journalists who listened to reports on the Library’s radio.115 In 1940, the library announced that it would lend books via the postal service in order to provide greater access to “culture” for the inhabitants of the borderlands.116 While it might seem that the Heshun region was unique, it is important to remember that the Chongxin Association’s origins lay in the educational developments of Mandalay, where the Yunnanese school was run not just by Heshun natives but also by men from other Yunnan trade towns. In Xizhou, the schools also became arenas of philanthropy for merchant reformers; they introduced the Commercial Press’s government-approved textbooks, ensuring that the curriculum included literature, math, geography, history, and physical education. Further educational and social reforms were implemented in 1925, when Xizhou’s leading merchants helped found a middle school, a library, and a medical clinic.117 By the time the anthropologist Francis Hsu arrived in the early 1940s, Xizhou had three modern schools for educating fourteen hundred students; each school was coeducational, and the middle school was run by a Qinghua University–trained scholar. The clinic employed two doctors, one trained at Peking Union Medical College, and the doctors provided free care for the poor.118



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The developments in Xizhou sound remarkable and some contemporaries certainly thought of them as extraordinary. To illustrate this point, many have turned to the great author Lao She, who wrote about his visit to Xizhou in 1941: Xizhou town is a wonder. I never thought that in this country, in such a remote area, I’d see such a respectable town. On entering the town, it’s as though one has arrived in England’s Cambridge. Along the streets, the gutters channel waste water; once the water leaves your building, the filth is gone. The streets are orderly, the shops are numerous. There is a library, and in front of it is a large marble ceremonial arch, and the words are in gold leaf. There is a police station, and there are imposing courtyard residences that resemble the imperial palace—all of them have carved beams and painted columns.119

–•– In Xizhou and Heshun and other trade towns, Yunnan’s merchant-entrepreneurs, who were products of a long-term process of commercialization begun in the High Qing, helped introduce institutions of major change to the seemingly remote Southwest. In the process, the merchants promoted the values of mobility, coeducation, societal improvement, and national modernity as they understood it. These values, moreover, were institutionalized in schools, clinics, and libraries, revealing how transnational merchants began to change some towns in Yunnan, pushing back against the gender and lineage institutions so recently created by their older kin. Not every town was a Heshun or a Xizhou, of course. In the Tai regions just to the west of Tengchong, elites such as Dao Anren and, later, his son Dao Baotu and his contemporaries sought education and development. But the Tai (and Kachin) were treated differently because of cultural and linguistic differences, as well as their positioning along the national borders. Han merchants and the Chinese states came to see education and development as things to be given to—or forced on—these communities, not as things that the community elites might control, as was the case in Heshun or even Xizhou, where Minjia language and culture were still powerful. Thus, as the Minjia elites had correctly gauged, a thin veneer of Chinese language and culture when combined with wealth might insulate non-Han communities from the growing pressures of the state and its discomfort with diversity. But what happened in other areas, where patterns of knowledge, trade, and capital did not work to empower communities through mobility, education, and autonomy? One answer to this question

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lies in a region where Yunnan corporations found some of their most lucrative goods: the medicines that, when exported to China and Southeast Asia, made the firms wealthy. Many of these medicines came not from Yunnan but from farther north in Kham.

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The Excluded

Can we not use the abundant pasturelands of western China’s plateau to develop our livestock industry in order to provide for our citizens’ needs? —“Methods for Developing Western Kham’s Agriculture” (IMH 20-00-63-009-04)

when Communist Party work teams entered Qiongshan Village in Kham’s Drakteng (Danba) region, they were looking for links between exploitation and poverty, and they found them. One farmer, a Khampa named Peldengyel (Bandeerjia), farmed 7.5 mu (0.5 hectare) of land granted to him by the local Drakteng king or gyelpo. In return, Peldengyel owed the king grain tax and corvée labor. But these burdens had proven to be too much at some point in the past, and to make ends meet, Peldengyel had mortgaged 3 mu of his land, taking on the dreaded high-interest loans that helped reinforce regional hierarchies of power and subordination. To pay the interest, Peldengyel continued to farm all his assigned land, but the grain from his three mortgaged mu went to pay interest on his debt, leaving his family of six to subsist on a measly 400 liters (4 dan) of grain for the year. This amount of grain provided just enough calories for one adult man,1 and the family did what 80 percent of their neighbors did: to make ends meet, they sought economic sidelines, in this case collecting plant and animal products that would be sold into Asia’s vast traditional medicine markets.2 In March 1957, Peldengyel’s family collected 20 kilos (40 jin) of qinjiao (Gentiana macrophylla), which they sold for two silver dollars (dayang), and in April, they dug 100 caterpillar fungi (chongcao), which they sold for one silver dollar. In June, they dug a half-kilo of beimu (Fritillaria thunbergii), which earned them another four silver dollars, and then in August, they had their IN 1957,

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best month, digging about 15 kilos of qianghuo (Notopterygium incisum) and 25 kilos of Chinese rhubarb (dahuang), for a take-home of eight silver dollars. Since each silver dollar could be exchanged for 10 liters of grain, the fifteen silver dollars were the equivalent of producing another 150 liters of grain. At some point during the year, the family harvested four musk deer, and they exchanged the musk pods for about 400 liters of grain. They also hunted other wild animals, bringing in the equivalent of 200 liters of grain. Like so many other Khampas, Peldengyel relied heavily on market-oriented sidelines to survive. His land grant produced only a net of 400 liters of grain, but his sales of medicinal materials earned the equivalent of another 750 liters of grain. This grain provided up to an additional 5,395 calories per day, which was still probably not enough, but got the family much closer to their caloric needs. Thus, Peldengyel’s nonfarming income constituted almost two-thirds of the total, a relatively large percentage in a village where the average for sideline work was about one-third of total income.3 The party work teams used this information to demonstrate how people such as Peldengyel were trapped in cycles of poverty. They owed rents, taxes, labor, and interest to the powerful kings, headmen, or monasteries who granted them land, and these obligations might be associated with a loosely defined sort of feudalism. But lying in plain sight alongside this “feudal” exploitation were two other powerful mechanisms of economic disempowerment that the Communist Party itself already wielded: the market and the Chinese state. Long before collectivization, much less the post-1979 market reforms, the Chinese state and powerful private merchant corporations were already limiting the opportunities for most Khampa families, and the party would build its control on the foundations created by the earlier states and firms. This chapter explores how this process, which is usually associated with the post-1979 era, unfolded in the early twentieth century. Its findings are critical for understanding China’s past and present because they suggest that the production of economic inequality, especially across ethnic lines, was not a result of the post-1979 period or state-led development plans alone. Instead, the sources of ethnic inequality are deeply entangled with modern economic and political development, which was aided by the explosive growth of earlytwentieth-century merchant firms, including those from western Yunnan. Studies show that the state and market have been used to disadvantage indigenous communities in their own homelands, but these studies focus on the post1949 or post-1979 eras. In her work on Tibet, for example, Emily Yeh describes



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how the Communist Party of the 1950s violently imposed state farms and communes in order to imprint Han Chinese authority over Tibet. In the reform era (1979–present), Yeh reveals how the state has orchestrated investment projects and selective market reforms to “gift” development to Tibetans; however, this gift enabled Han to dominate sectors of the market economy, leaving Tibetans marginalized economically.4 One main cause of marginalization, Andrew Martin Fischer argues, is the Chinese state’s vision of development, which removes decision-making power from the region’s inhabitants, leaving them without control over capital or planning. Fischer labels this “disempowered development.”5 For Peldengyel and other Khampas in the early 1950s, disempowerment was not something lurking in the future—once the party gained full control. Since 1905, they had experienced major economic, political, and social changes caused by market economics and a sporadically powerful developmentalist state. To the south of Peldengyel’s Drakteng home, in the regions surrounding Dartsedo (Kangding), lay the old lands of the Chakla king. Like the king in Drakteng, the Chakla king had controlled vast swaths of farmland, which he granted to tenants in return for labor and tax obligations. But the king did not survive the last dynasty’s modernization efforts of 1895–1911. Instead, he was deposed and died attempting to escape from his imperial captors.6 After removing the king from power, the state took his land, and local farmers found themselves to be tenants to a new master. Over the course of the early twentieth century, moreover, Khampa farmers found that the state was increasingly recruiting Han migrants to settle Kham’s lands. Before the Communist state even began visiting violence on local populations, tremendous changes were already being wrought by the market, the state, and migrants.7 In Peldengyel’s home region of Drakteng, for instance, Han settlement was on the rise in the 1930s. One estimate from the early 1930s places the Han population at 2,540; Khampas numbered 21,350.8 As the Han population grew, Han merchants tended to gain control over local trade, and as this chapter will demonstrate, this generally limited most Khampas’ ability to profit from commercial growth. As the state gained control over land, it also sought to manage important mineral resources in many locations, which further contributed to the process of disempowerment. These findings suggest the need to reevaluate elements of Chinese development by using a longer-range historical framework and including an evaluation of private as well as public corporations. One reason to do so is to probe how deeply Chinese modernity and inequality are intertwined. To initiate that

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probing, this chapter is organized around a simple puzzle. In early eighteenth-century Kham, there emerged for the first time a robust commercial economy. When the Kangxi emperor (r. 1661–1722) designated Dartsedo as a trade mart, he intended the trade to benefit Khampas and Tibetans, and there is no doubt that some Khampas took advantage.9 In the long run, however, we know that the Chinese state and Han traders would gain control of development in the ways that Fischer and Yeh revealed. When and why did this trajectory of disempowerment begin? The answer to this question is multifaceted. There was no singular moment or process of change, but a series of changes in politics and commerce concentrated not just in the post-1949 period but between the 1870s and 1940s. During this period, Khampa communities were incorporated more deeply into growing regional and global commercial systems. This was also the period in which Khampas became the objects of powerful state-building projects orchestrated from the national and provincial capitals in Beijing, Nanjing, and Chengdu. There are two keys to these intersecting political and commercial changes. First, Chinese state builders increasingly sought to undermine Khampa elites, transforming them from legitimate local rulers who had been cultivated by the Qing empire into illegitimate tyrants at odds with the purposes of the modern Chinese nation-state. Second, both private and state-led commerce contributed to the processes of excluding non-Han indigenous communities from controlling local resources and trade. There were, in other words, two networks of exclusion, or peripheralization as Mandy Sadan has labeled the concurrent process in northern Burma. One was undergirded by corporate capital and the organization of private firms and the other by the new ambitions and institutions of modern state building.10 As in the post-1979 period, these two networks of exclusion came to be linked in important ways, and they eventually constituted core elements of China’s particular transition to modernity. The repercussions have been dire for borderlands communities and for China. To examine the commercial changes of the 1870s through 1940s, this chapter follows the Yunnanese corporations into Kham to explain the overall growth of privately financed commerce and reveal the changing local dynamics of commodity production. Along with Shaanxi and Sichuanese firms, the Yunnanese were able to link more Kham producers to larger and more extensive networks of regional and even global trade. The private trading corporations were well capitalized. Moreover, using the new organizational and bookkeeping technologies examined in chapter 1, they could reach more deeply into



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local communities to purchase and move highland products to Chongqing, Kunming, Mandalay, and even Shanghai and Hong Kong. The firms were responding to increasing regional and global demand, and they shipped musk as far as Paris for the burgeoning perfume industry, while also purchasing and transporting Chinese traditional medicine products to meet growing demand in Guangdong, Hong Kong, and Southeast Asia. The ability of corporations to extend their business in Kham was, perhaps counterintuitively, aided by the destabilization of the region by the Qing between 1905 and 1911. This destabilization was provoked by Qing adoption of Euro-American models of colonialism in the wake of the British invasion of Lhasa. There followed a brutal military campaign to suppress and even eradicate indigenous institutions of power in Kham. After the Qing regime fell in 1911–1912, Kham became an arena for competition as monasteries, secular aristocratic families, merchants, Lhasa, and various forms of the new Republican Chinese state jockeyed for power. While commerce was frequently interrupted by conflict, this period of competition actually allowed new private and state-owned corporations to gain power. This process, when combined with the political changes, laid the foundations for modern China’s long-term practices of development, which tend to disempower local, non-Han communities. In this chapter, then, we continue to follow the fortunes of the Yunnan trading firms, but their story is now placed within a broader geographical and political context as we move into Kham and explore in detail the concurrent transformations of the various forms of the modern Chinese state. –•– For many generations, Chinese merchants had gone to Kham to trade. In the eighteenth century, it had been the Shaanxi merchants who were the first outsiders to make their mark. By the 1730s, Shaanxi merchants were increasing in the important trading town of Dartsedo, and they held the majority of the tea permits for shipping Sichuan tea via Kham to greater Tibet (figure 12).11 Patrick Booz reports that eighty tea firms—many of them Shaanxi-run—were operating out of Ya’an, Sichuan, with branches in Dartsedo, where the Shaanxi merchants often dealt with the famous achak khapa (guozhuang), Khampa innkeepers with roots in the hereditary nobility. The achak khapa served to mediate exchanges between the Chinese tea merchants and Tibetan wholesalers, many of whom were merchant representatives of monasteries both in Kham and Central Tibet (figure 13).12

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FIGURE 12.   Carrying

brick tea to Dartsedo.

S ou rc e : Image courtesy of the Arnold Arboretum Horticultural Library Archives. Photo by Ernest Henry Wilson, ca. 1907–1909, Eastern Asian Historical Photography Collections, © President and Fellows of Harvard College, Arnold Arboretum Library. Reprinted with permission.

At first, Shaanxi firms operated primarily in the official trade mart at Dartsedo, importing tea and cloth to trade for Kham products. By the nineteenth century, however, Shaanxi firms had established branches in other Kham trade towns to purchase commodities from low-level wholesalers, who had acquired them directly from producers. To make these purchases, Shaanxi apprentices were expected to learn Tibetan before being dispatched into the field, and many Shaanxi merchants also learned to dress, ride, and eat like Tibetans. It seems that the Shaanxi traders who left Dartsedo and entered smaller settlements became acculturated to Tibetan ways, often intermarrying and even sending sons into the monasteries.13



FIGURE 13.   Dartsedo

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monasteries. Monasteries often held great economic and political power

in Kham. S ou rc e : Image courtesy of the Arnold Arboretum Horticultural Library Archives. Photo by Ernest Henry Wilson, ca. 1907–1909, Eastern Asian Historical Photography Collections, © President and Fellows of Harvard College, Arnold Arboretum Library. Reprinted with permission.

Others soon followed the Shaanxi merchants to Kham markets. Most notable were the Sichuanese, but there were also the Muslim Chinese firms working through Chengdu, Songpan, and Qinghai.14 In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Yunnanese merchants gradually began to extend their reach into Kham. Travelers reported Lijiang merchants in Dartsedo as early as 1890, but at that time, most Yunnanese caravans carried tea or textiles only as far north as Gyeltang (Zhongdian) or perhaps to Dechen (Atunzi), where they would, without venturing farther north, sell to Tibetan traders.15 This would change over the course of the early twentieth century. It requires some detective work to trace the rise of Yunnan merchants in Kham and Tibet. Foreign observers began to note an increase in Yunnanese activity in the 1910s. In 1915, Oliver Coales reported that Yunnan firms sold about £30,000 (200,000 taels) of opium in Dartsedo; the merchants cashed checks drawn from Rangoon banks, revealing that international trade networks were undergirding their reach into Kham. In Dartsedo, the

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Yunnanese initially bought Indian rupees, which were imported into silverpoor Yunnan.16 If we examine the available company archives, we can plausibly reconstruct these firms’ expansion into Kham. By the 1920s at the latest, Yongchangxiang was exporting from Kham thousands of ounces of silver worth of caterpillar fungus and other medicinal materials. At the end of 1930, for example, the Kunming headquarters had on hand 1,349.5 kilos of beimu, valued at 23,353.06 yuan.17 In other words, Yongchangxiang was tapping into the growing medicinal materials trade and relying on its extensive distribution networks in China proper in order to profit from Kham products. Evidence from Maoheng’s company books reveals the firm to have been a major importer of tea and cloth into Kham. With growing access to the traditional Yunnan tea production as well as imported yarns and textiles from India and Europe, Maoheng developed trading outposts and warehousing to distribute these goods into Kham from Xichang (Jianchang), to the southwest of Ya’an. Based on records from the 1939–1940 trading season, the company imported over thirty thousand spools of yarn to sell in Sichuan and Kham; they also brought in over three thousand Indian piece-goods.18 In these endeavors, Yongchangxiang and Maoheng were not alone. Merchants from Lijiang and Heqing firms came to specialize in the Kham trade.19 This specialization included the establishment of permanent branches in northernmost Yunnan and in Dartsedo, Batang, and Litang.20 Throughout the 1930s and into the wartime and postwar periods, the Heqing firm of Hengshenggong maintained branches at Dechen and Dartsedo that frequently shipped Kham exports via Lijiang to Kunming and beyond. To do so, they contracted with individual caravan companies and their leaders (maguotou).21 In addition, Hengshenggong was doing business in Lhasa by shipping Yunnan tea via Burma and Kalimpong, India, into Tibet.22 One 1943 government report claimed that Hengshenggong had been doing this since the early 1920s—and that a competitor, Hongsheng, had been doing it since the early 1910s.23 During the wartime period, when the Burma-India export route was blocked, both Maoheng and Yongchangxiang extended from Kham to engage directly in trade through Lhasa to Kalimpong and Kolkata.24 Through the correspondence of Maoheng managers, we also know that the Yunnan firms of Renhechang and Hongxingyuan were operating in Kham and Tibet during the wartime years.25 Based on company and state archival evidence, then, Yunnan firms were increasingly active in Kham, suggesting that they had built their networks into the region from approximately 1910 onward. These opportunities for extending



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directly into Kham corresponded with a period in which Yunnan businesses were becoming more organized and better capitalized, of course. But if we look to understand why these firms were becoming more active in Kham, then we must understand the political changes taking place. This was an era of tremendous disruption, a period when power was being reconceived and reconfigured, and yet, despite periodic disruptions of trade, the instability seems to have provided opportunities for businesses to gain more commercial power. According to Oliver Coales, the Yunnanese were able to expand into Dartsedo and challenge Shaanxi and Sichuanese merchant firms because of political instability. What Coales meant by “political instability” was limited to the 1911 revolution in Sichuan, which disrupted the old tea trade regime, significantly decreasing tea exports. The Shaanxi firms had controlled this trade, but as tea imports from Sichuan declined, the number of Shaanxi corporations dwindled from fifty firms to only twenty.26 Yunnan corporations then stepped into this market to meet Tibetan demands for tea. Coales thus reveals the connection between political instability in 1911–1912 and the rise of Yunnan merchants in Kham. But if we wish to understand the ways in which disempowered development emerged, we must consider political instability in much broader terms, and this requires a detailed excursion into large-scale, empire-wide politics. –•– In August 1905, the Qing court created the Sichuan-Yunnan Frontier Affairs Commission (Chuan Dian bianwu dachen), which was designed to implement direct, sovereign control over Kham. At its head was the notorious Zhao Erfeng, a man who would seek to turn Kham upside down in his effort to transform it. As in other borderlands around the empire, a new era had dawned—one of direct governance that intentionally imitated Euro-American colonial practices and rejected any significant cooperation with indigenous Khampa elites.27 This rejection of cooperation with Khampa elites was a repudiation of traditional Qing governing practices. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the Qing rulers doubled the size of the old Ming territory, bringing diverse communities under control by implementing governing structures that diverged from those of China proper (neidi), the region of the old Ming territories where the legal and administrative systems were run by central government appointees who had passed the grueling Confucian civil service exams. In the new borderlands, the power to allocate resources, administer justice, and use legitimate force was often lodged only tentatively in central government

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appointees, who judiciously delegated authority to indigenous institutions. As with other large empires, then, the Qing realm was defined by institutional hybridity and indirect rule, and there is reason to believe that the Qianlong emperor (r. 1736–1799), who had expended much blood and treasure to expand his realm, reveled in the diversity.28 Throughout Kham and other borderlands regions, the Qing endorsed legal and administrative systems that drew from local institutions of power. In pursuing what were essentially policies of segregation, Qing officials responded to practical considerations (it was often expensive and difficult to fully conquer indigenous elites) but also to contemporary intellectual concepts that understood human diversity as emanating from fundamental differences in human nature (xing). Members of communities who were categorized as yi—people different from the Qing subjects (minren) of China proper—were frequently thought to harbor alien natures, and whether a group’s nature could be civilized, meaning it could be acculturated through education to fit the norms of China proper, was open to debate. Some believed that it was difficult to civilize (tonghua) other peoples. Others considered all peoples to be similarly human and open to civilization through education.29 In the eighteenth century, the men who typically formulated borderlands policy tended to believe in the fundamental differences in human nature, meaning that they did not think it easy to acculturate or civilize. They also assumed that communities of difference required unequal treatment before the law and even, if possible, segregated living space. In the Qing empire, segregated living spaces were institutionalized in policy and evoked in the language of spatiality. In Hunan, for example, there were the Miao borderlands (Miaojiang), where legal and administrative practices were tailored to the Miao, non-Han peoples of the Southwest.30 Large parts of the Southwest were subjected to spatially distinct sets of laws and administration, and their indigenous elites were regarded as the rightful rulers in these lands. This was true in northwestern borderlands as well. In Xinjiang, for instance, the Qing developed parallel political and legal institutions so that in southern Xinjiang, Turkestani officials (begs) were appointed to administer the Turki speakers through sharia law; in eastern Xinjiang, Han civilians were subject to centrally appointed imperial officials as they would have been in China proper; and in the North, Mongol communities were under local Mongol nobles (jasaks).31 In Kham, the Qing had also incorporated local cultural and political institutions. In the 1660s, when the Qing first came to Kham as part of the regime’s search for stability in greater Tibet, it fought short but violent battles for control



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over Dartsedo, where the Qing designated the Chakla king (gyelpo) as a native ruler (tusi) and then opened Dartsedo as a trade mart in 1702.32 The Qing then sought to divide and rule Kham as they did other parts of the Southwest borderlands. This included placing much of the region under Sichuan Province and seeking to undermine the more powerful Khampa rulers. They did so not by removing them but by recognizing their subordinates as native officials (tusi) and principal landowners in their own right, surveying and fixing all tusi territories, and clarifying the chain of command. The goal was to enable weaker subordinate rulers to make legal claims on revenue, thus preventing more powerful rulers from amassing the resources needed for challenging imperial authority. This was standard operating procedure throughout the empire, though the Qing was less successful in Kham. In many cases, Khampa power holders developed a relationship with the Qing that was not bureaucratic and fixed but constantly being renegotiated,33 and local Khampa elites came to rely only in part on Qing recognition. More important were local sources of legitimacy, including control of land, militias, religion, and commerce.34 Power in Kham was therefore fluid and complicated. Different configurations of power emerged in different locations, and a few are summarized here.35 From Dartsedo, the Chakla king extended his influence over Tawu (Daofu) and Drakteng. Recognized as the Mingzheng tusi by Beijing, the Chakla king shared influence with Qing officials, including oversight of the trade economy, and this trade attracted a third group that wielded some local power: a variety of merchants, some of whom were local Khampas but many others with Chinese (Shaanxi, Sichuan) or Tibetan (Lhasa, Amdo) backgrounds. To the north of Chakla were smaller polities run by secular aristocracies. Farther west and across the Mount Gyula Pass lay Litang and Batang, both ruled by hereditary governors (sde pa, depa) whose ancestors were originally appointed by Lhasa in the seventeenth century. In Batang, the hereditary governor had great influence, but local monastic officials from the Dinglin Monastery could also mobilize material, ideological, and military resources. In Litang, monastic officials, especially at the Ganden Thubchen Choekhorling Monastery, held the most power. Over the course of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the monastery had developed vast trade networks, reaching into Yunnan, Sichuan, Qinghai, Lhasa, and beyond. To the south of Litang and Batang was Muli (Mili), which was under the domain of a reincarnated lama. And along the Yunnan border, in Chatreng (Xiangcheng), there were two hierarchies of power—a secular ruler (tusi) in Upper Chatreng who answered to both the

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Qing and to the Litang sde pa, and, in Lower Chatreng, the powerful monastery of Sangpiling. When Zhao Erfeng arrived in Kham in 1905, he brought into this complicated political environment a cluster of controversial ideas. One had to do with a new conception of state authority in the borderlands. This idea dated to the 1870s when, in the wake of a great rebellion in Xinjiang, some Qing officials had begun to reject the legitimacy of indigenous, non-Han rulers in borderlands territories. Led by Zuo Zongtang, these officials drew from earlier thinkers, including Zuo’s fellow Hunanese Wei Yuan (1794–1856), to argue that indigenous leaders, the begs and jasaks, undermined imperial authority and left Qing territory vulnerable to foreign imperialism.36 To overcome this, Zuo argued that the state should dispatch centrally appointed magistrates, who, because they were trained in the Confucian classics, would provide a direct, ethical link between state and people. Explicit in Zuo’s argument was a belief in the ethical superiority of China proper’s governing institutions. And he combined this ethical argument with a new approach to territorial authority. Claiming that Xinjiang was “our ancient soil” (wo jiutu), Zuo argued for ruling Xinjiang in ways that the international community would recognize as sovereignty.37 The fact that a Han official from Hunan would claim Xinjiang as part of his “ancient soil” revealed how much had changed since the eighteenth century, when most Han officials opposed the Qianlong emperor’s conquests in Xinjiang. For Zuo, unlike the Qianlong emperor, the borderlands territories were no longer appreciated for their diversity, and it was no longer possible to allow different peoples and their indigenous leaders to be accommodated. In his efforts to reconfigure borderland governance, Zuo faced opponents who continued to argue that different types (zhonglei) of people, with their different human natures, required different forms of government, and the county system run by centrally appointed magistrates was suitable only for Han from the interior.38 Historian Sudebilege characterizes this position as support for the empire’s earlier hybridity, and it continued to be a powerful way of thinking.39 As a result, the debates over Xinjiang’s governance were, in important ways, over the future of China. Would long-standing diverse governing approaches be upheld or overthrown? What type of state would the Qing empire become? The answer was partially settled in 1884 when Beijing designated Xinjiang as a province and plans were set into motion to replace its eighteenth-century indirect mechanisms of rule. In the end, the Qing were unable to fully remove indigenous elites from power, but in rhetorically denying them legitimate



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leadership roles, Zuo and his supporters created an environment in which indigenous authority was questioned, provoking wider reflection about who did and did not belong in China. The contemporary Shanghai newspaper Shenbao, for instance, covered Xinjiang events and openly questioned whether Muslims belonged in China. Did their presence undermine the type of cultural and religious unity that made modern states strong? This was a serious concern for contemporary elites who feared for China’s future in a competitive world of modern states and imperialism.40 In the Kham of 1905, two crucial decades had elapsed since the Xinjiang debates, and the ideas about imperial authority in the borderlands had continued to evolve. As James Leibold has noted, from 1895 forward, Chinese thinkers tapped into global ideas for thinking about China and its problems. One important idea was social Darwinism, accessed through Chinese translations and interpretations of Herbert Spencer, Aldous Huxley, and other social evolutionary thinkers. Whereas Zuo Zongtang had stressed the ethical dimension of Han Chinese superiority as a key reason for replacing Xinjiang elites with Han officials, social Darwinism taught that difference was not just about ethics; it was embedded in a biology that was shaped by competition against other races. If one’s race was not competitive, it could be wiped from the earth by the inexorable logic of the survival of the fittest. And the instrument of competition was the nation-state, which mobilized the race to compete politically, economically, and culturally against other nations.41 For Chinese thinkers and statesmen who feared for China’s competitiveness, it became a matter of survival to correctly define who would be included in the Chinese race and nation. In the hands of some Chinese thinkers, the net of race was cast broadly to include the diverse communities of the vast Qing empire. Borrowing from Swiss theories of multiracial citizenship, Liang Qichao imagined a Chinese nation formed throughout the empire, but with the Han race dominating and assimilating the peoples of the borderlands.42 His vision was challenged by revolutionaries intent on establishing a separate, homogeneous Han state. 43 As intellectuals brooded over China’s future, the ideas of national competitiveness and racial unity seeped into the thinking of policymakers, many of whom feared that the vast and diverse borderlands were the weak points where foreign powers could gain a foothold. Increasingly, they turned to the idea of Han superiority to promote migration as a tool for gaining authority over and encouraging economic development in backward borderlands. In 1902, for example, Cen Chunxuan, the son of the brutal Cen Yuying (see chapter 5) and an ally of

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the court, proposed transforming parts of Mongolia into provinces where Han farmers could legally open land to cultivation, a policy that would overturn long-standing regulations against Han migration to Mongol territories. In the mind of the official sent to implement this proposal, the plan would strengthen the state at this vital frontier.44 Mongols were less sure, and their resistance reflected widespread local dissatisfaction with the new plan.45 The debate over Mongolia’s future revolved around new ways of thinking about territory, economy, and the difference between Han and non-Han subjects of the empire. When Cen updated his plan for Mongolia in May 1907, he articulated a self-conscious rejection of the past, arguing that contemporary historical conditions were novel and that the state must adapt. Within its “sovereign territory (suo shu zhi di),” the state must establish law, collect information about the territory, manage defense, and promote development. To accomplish this, Cen argued for the establishment of three provinces, centered in Inner Mongolia, and an aggressive extension of land reclamation into Outer Mongolia. Han migrants were to be recruited by merchants, who would earn rewards if they met certain benchmarks in the numbers of households settled, acreage reclaimed, or mines opened. For Cen, the goal was to create an integrated state administration overseeing a commercial economy that could support a modern, sovereign state, and private merchant firms were part of this future.46 Cen Chunxuan was part of a new effort to reorder Qing territory, and his ideas found broad but not universal support. The vision of a diverse, hybrid empire was still strong, and opponents of provincial governance for Outer Mongolia cited its alterity and incompatibility with Chinese ways.47 Mongol nobles and commoners resisted as well, and this resistance forced a degree of reassessment. As the state sought to increase capacity in Mongolia, it met with difficulty in fully abandoning imperial institutions, as later governments would.48 Nevertheless, the new thinking behind Cen’s plan did lead to major changes. New state institutions, including schools and police stations, were established, and the legal barriers that had segregated Mongols from Han were eroded.49 In Kham, these new concepts were also introduced. The calls for change had begun in the 1880s, when a rebellion in Nyarong (Zhandui) prompted the Sichuan governor-general to propose direct administration.50 His plan was rebuffed by the Qing court, but the ideas continued to percolate among imperial officials and Han elites in Sichuan, who were at the forefront of a major shift in the way that elite Chinese perceived borderlands regions.51 We can understand this shift as a cognitive one in which the state and elites call the nation



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into being, meaning that they created for the first time a compelling vision of a national community and territory.52 To call the nation into being in places such as Kham, however, required the creation of new types of knowledge about the region. In this endeavor, modern social and natural sciences were mobilized to survey and categorize peoples, take censuses, and identify and exploit natural resources. This process of surveying the land to unlock its productive potential was related to efforts to carry out social surveys that would reveal who the Khampas were and how they needed to be civilized in order to join the Chinese nation. Both processes helped, as Tong Lam has argued, to create and communicate certain facts about China that would “produce the collective national subject” by making China, including its borderlands, imaginable for the public, most of whom would never visit any borderlands areas in person.53 As early as the 1890s, Sichuanese elites were developing images designed to reveal and make imaginable both Kham and Tibet. They chose to portray Tibet as a backward place that belonged to China and Tibetans as a people who needed saving by the Chinese.54 In journal articles, Sichuanese writers called for the public to make various cognitive leaps and acquire new perceptions about the political community called China. In Republican times, these efforts would become more sophisticated, but people were already being asked to conceive the borderlands as vital national territories, to imagine them as China’s historical legacy, and to embrace Khampas and Tibetans as fellow citizens who were exploited by rapacious lamas, threatened by foreign imperialists, and thus in need of help to develop culturally and economically. These views would echo in the words of the merchant-reformers of Heshun as they described the inadequacies and dangers of the Tai elite along the Burma border.55 Even today we can hear the legacies of this discourse in descriptions of the Dalai Lama and Uyghur elites, and thus it has become a durable and powerful weapon to denigrate minority leaders. In their journal articles, the Sichuanese authors experimented with ways to make Kham and Tibet imaginable for their readers. In a June 1898 article, published in Chengdu’s Shuxue bao, Wang Rongmao explained the growing British and Russian influence in Tibet, and he urged Chinese to accumulate new forms of knowledge about the region in order to implement political reform that would secure it for China. To eradicate older forms of indigenous elite governance, Wang noted, would require new geographical knowledge, and he suggested a model: Western travel accounts and maps, which were precise in detail, particularly when it came to summarizing regional products,

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local political conditions, and geographical features. With this knowledge, Wang suggested, the Chinese state could colonize Tibetan lands, develop trade, exploit mineral wealth, and use poor Sichuanese to build railroads.56 Wang’s fellow Shuxue bao author, Chen Qichang, developed important imagery to help people imagine Tibet and Kham as Chinese territory. Chen described Sichuan as a courtyard home and Tibet as the screen (waiping) protecting the home from the street. Without Tibet, Sichuan was exposed to the outside world, and he therefore urged a policy that treated Sichuan and Tibet together. To do this, Chen recommended eradicating the Tibetan Buddhist hierarchy.57 By 1901, when Qingyi bao ran a piece on Tibet’s “strange customs” (qisu), the imagery of Tibet and Kham as an exotic, barbaric, and yet vital territory was already going national. And then, in the winter of 1903–1904, a British expedition invaded Tibet, reaching Lhasa in 1904.58 The invasion received wide coverage in national newspapers, and in October 1904, Xinmin congbao ran “Grieving for Tibet,” a piece placing British transgressions against Chinese sovereignty into a broader context. The story criticized the Qing state for its weak response and placed Tibet within a larger framework of “grieving” for all borderlands territories: the Japanese were threatening the Northeast, the British Tibet, and the Russians, feeling outmaneuvered by the other powers, might turn to Mongolia for compensation. The article lamented the general apathy toward these humiliations, an attitude that allowed the British a strategic hold in the planet’s highest region, from which they could influence Xinjiang, Sichuan, Yunnan, and, through Tibetan Buddhism, Qinghai and Mongolia.59 It was in this larger context that Zhao Erfeng entered Kham in 1905. Under his leadership, Qing troops rejected indigenous leadership and sought to eradicate it. They attacked Batang, Litang, and Chatreng (Xiangcheng). In each place, leading secular and religious elites were executed as the Qing, in conscious imitation of Euro-American colonial policies, sought to seize control of politics, trade, and land.60 Overall, the late Qing state sought to radically realign local administration, taxation, and landownership. Whereas land had originally belonged to secular rulers and monasteries and those who worked the land owed rents, tax-in-kind, and labor, the Qing state began to claim the power to rent land, allow Han migrants to open new lands, and encourage the monetization of rents as a way to undermine older, servile relationships. In these ways, the Qing worked to extend state power through administration, state control of property, and the introduction of the market.61



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Zhao Erfeng’s influence in Kham lasted for six years; he met his end in December 1911 when he was executed by Sichuanese revolutionaries. That same year, the remnants of Qing troops in Kham were reorganized into the SichuanKham Defense Force and gained financial support from the Sichuan provincial government.62 In 1912, the newly autonomous Sichuan military government created the Office for Managing the Frontier (choubianchu), which would continue trying to transform Kham into Chinese territory. The Sichuanese government faced two major challengers. First, the Ganden Phodrang, the Dalai Lama–led government in Lhasa, sent troops into western Kham, extending Lhasa’s control over parts of the region.63 Second, the Yunnan Army invaded Sichuan proper and began extending its influence into eastern Kham as well.64 By 1916, the Yunnanese had gained control of the frontier commissioner position, appointing Yin Chenghuan, who had been trained in the famous Yunnan Military Academy. Yin reached into the Yunnan Tibetan Buddhist hierarchy for help, bringing a leading monk from Lijiang to help oversee the Buddhist communities in Dartsedo.65 At the same time, Yunnanese troops were gaining control of the remnants of the Defense Force, and by 1917, Yunnanese officers and soldiers were controlling Batang. Although the Yunnan Army’s influence in Kham did not last long, its short foray into Kham provided an advantage to Yunnanese firms. It was at this time that these firms were developing the organizational means to raise sufficient capital, orchestrate trade across vast distances, and ensure profits for their investors. The Yunnan firms’ expansion into Kham, moreover, coincided with the decline of the Shaanxi merchants and the Sichuan tea imports. As Booz notes, the Yunnanese were busy becoming the largest supplier of brick tea to Lhasa and southern Kham—something that they would accomplish for the first time in the 1920s and 1930s.66 This was made possible by firms such as Yongchangxiang, which developed the infrastructure to reach from southern Yunnan’s tea-producing regions into Kham. Yongchangxiang’s managers, for example, learned to process southern Yunnan tea for the Tibet market in Xiaguan, Yunnan, as did a number of other Yunnan firms, including Maoheng.67 While Yunnan firms adapted their business practices to facilitate their reach into Kham, they also benefited from the increasingly aggressive colonial policies of the Qing and later Chinese states. In its summary of local industry and commerce, the Kham Gazetteer reveals that the late Qing and early Republican periods brought more government intervention, which led to greater support for Han merchants in Kham. The entries are vague about what policies were

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introduced, but one of the early Republican military governors in Kham, Yin Changheng, is credited with continuing Zhao Erfeng’s policies of promoting migration of Han merchants and settlers in places such as Tawu and Drakteng.68 State promotion of migration and the undermining of indigenous authority would open Khampa resources up to greater exploitation by state and private corporations. To understand what this process meant for local communities and their control of resources, it is helpful to dig deeper into mechanisms for collecting and marketing traditional medicinal ingredients. –•– In Kham, medicinal materials could be collected from three sources: vegetable, animal, and mineral. Plant-based medicinal materials included zhimu (Anemarrhena asphodeloides), beimu, qinjiao, Chinese rhubarb, and huanglian (Chinese goldthread). The most expensive animal product was musk (shexiang), but other important animal products were pilose antler (lurong), deer antler (lujiao), bear gall bladder (xiongdan), leopard bones (baogu), and the famous caterpillar fungus. Mineral-based medicinal materials included sulfur, sodium borate, and mica.69 In one of the increasingly numerous surveys of the Kham economy, investigators found in the late 1930s that these products were widely dispersed in terms of geography and ecology. Wild huanglian grew on the sides of the precipitous mountains, while beimu flourished in alpine meadows. Zhimu could be found among the debris in rocky crags.70 The best musk, some said, came from Kham’s river gorges and forests. This was the musk that was in demand in Shanghai and European markets.71 Khampas hunted musk deer in the spring and fall, when the bucks’ musk was considered to be strongest. They collected caterpillar fungus and beimu during the slack seasons, when they were not herding or tending their crops. They would then trade their medicines in return for tea and cloth, though they sometimes sold their products for money.72 The medicine trade was worth a great deal of money. In the 1940s, beimu might sell for about 250 yuan per liang (31.25 grams) or about half the price of musk. Zhimu sold for about one-third the price of musk, and in the 1940s, the compilers of the Kham Gazetteer reported that exports might total 30,000 to 40,000 liang for each product, meaning that about a metric ton of each product was being exported.73 If a liang of beimu was worth 250 yuan, then a kilo was worth 8,000 yuan, and a metric ton was worth 8 million yuan. If Khampa families collected all of the beimu to be exported and each family collected roughly



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the same amount as Peldengyel’s half-kilo, then two thousand families might be involved in the harvest and, theoretically, they might each earn 4,000 yuan. But this was not how it worked, of course, as Peldengyel’s measly four silver dollars, the earnings from his family’s beimu harvest, suggests. The primary collectors and hunters earned small amounts of money, if any. Often they traded their medicines for cloth or tea. Understanding who controlled the profits of production means first understanding the variety and hierarchy of commercial institutions. If individual Khampa households occupied the bottom of the hierarchy, then the next level was occupied by the petty merchants. These small-time peddlers, called bachong, specialized in dealing with the primary producers. While there is no doubt that these bachong traveled widely in agricultural and pastoral areas, there is some doubt as to who they were. Most Chinese-language reports list them as Han who lived among the Khampas, but at least one report notes that the bachong came from among the Khampas themselves.74 Most likely there were some bachong who were Khampas, which the Communists noted in their surveys, but most were probably descendants of Shaanxi merchants who in some cases had intermarried and acculturated to Khampa ways.75 The bachong, then, were permanent residents in Khampa areas, and they wandered among the large and small farming villages—or in the herding grounds—buying medicinal materials.76 The bachong made it easier for Khampas who did not live near markets to sell or trade goods, thus broadening the net of commercialization throughout the region. In one government investigation in 1947, for example, researchers found that itinerant merchants gathered animal products in grassland areas far from the nearest markets. In Sershul (Shiqu County), for example, there was no regular market, but the bachong merchants facilitated the export of about 12,500 cattle hides and 2,000 dan of sheep wool to Dartsedo each year.77 In selling their medicines or other products, however, local Khampas were often restricted to the prices that bachong offered, meaning that they rarely could earn high prices or make lucrative trades. The bachong were, in turn, subject to the next layer of the collection hierarchy: the shopkeepers in the nearest market towns, who then dealt with the larger merchant firms based in Dartsedo and other big towns.78 The shopkeeper and bachong network is one of the likely sources of the over 1,000 kilos of beimu that Yongchangxiang had in stock in Kunming in 1930. Such a large quantity of beimu—approximately a year’s export volume in the 1940s—demonstrates how a large firm might control most of the exports.

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As the twentieth century unfolded, the collection of medicines became professionalized, and the large firms developed the ability to bypass the shopkeepers and local Khampa producers altogether. This was done by working through Han migrants, usually Sichuanese, who took up medicine gathering. In contrast to the Khampa agriculturalists and herders, the migrant gatherers were full-time medicine workers called yaofu or yaofuzi. They formed teams called medicine sheds (yaopeng) and set out each summer to harvest wild medicines under the oversight of their shed head (pengzhang). The shed heads funded the venture, purchasing food and supplies, and paid a mountain rent (shanzu) to whomever had rights to the land on which they gathered. Usually, however, they were not gathering in areas with ownership claims. The medicine shed teams did not work through the bachong, but had the autonomy to transport their goods to larger markets, something that the Khampa gatherers often could not do.79 Some of these Han medicine workers were independents, but others were hired and capitalized by larger merchant firms that were paid with the medicines at the end of the season.80 As medicine gathering was professionalized, Chinese firms developed direct access to raw materials, bypassing the bachong and Khampa producers. While this did not eradicate the role of Khampa gatherers, it did provide them with competition. Once goods arrived in Dartsedo or other larger trade towns like Batang— whether through the bachong and shopkeepers or through the medicine workers—the larger firms gained control of them. While these larger firms continued to include Tibetan and Khampa merchants (monastic and secular),81 the percentage of Chinese firms increased over time, as did their absolute numbers. In 1890, notes Booz, Chinese firms controlled about 60 percent of the business capital in Dartsedo and Tibetan merchants about 40 percent.82 As the Sichuan tea trade declined after the 1911 Revolution, however, local Khampa businesses, including the famous achak khapa or guozhuang, went into decline.83 Into their place came new Chinese firms, including the Yunnanese corporations, which might bypass Dartsedo altogether. Thus, Han Chinese and Minjia merchants from Yunnan were increasingly influential in the importing and exporting Kham’s commercial goods. This does not mean that their firms took over Kham completely. Important firms were managed by people of other backgrounds too: Shaanxi, Sichuanese, specific monasteries, and particular elite Khampa families.84 In some areas, the large monasteries were among the largest traders and controllers of production.85 Still, the trend was that Chinese merchant firms were making greater inroads



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into Kham. The point is that commerce, while opening opportunities for families like Peldengyel’s to supplement their livelihoods, was also limiting the possibilities that Khampa families might gain real economic leverage through the market. The power of corporate merchant firms was simply too great. –•– If we expand our investigation beyond medicinal materials and private corporations to include other natural resources such as minerals, we see yet another important transformation in the years after 1905: various forms of the state were gaining control over Kham’s resources. In the next two chapters, we will return to Yunnan to explore state corporations and commercial power in more detail, but this chapter’s final pages reveal how, beginning in 1905, the state was increasingly involved in claiming rights to Khampa lands and resources. Zhao Erfeng, for example, hired an American-trained mining engineer, Liu Shilun, to survey gold, silver, and coal deposits in the Dartsedo area.86 Zhao’s interest in Kham’s minerals was stimulated by a decade of increased attention to mining and minerals. In the wake of the defeat to Japan in 1895, as empirewide discussions of mining increased, the imperial censor Chen Qizhang had proposed that each province survey its mineral deposits. In Chen’s opinion, moreover, the state should consider sending military teams out to run mines in border provinces, while civilian public-private (guandu shangban) corporations would be suitable for managing mines in China proper. Chen’s ideas were echoed by another minister, who also recommended the use of the army for mining in Sichuan.87 When the court did, in fact, order all provinces to survey and develop mines, the influential Liu Kunyi singled out Kham (northwestern Yunnan and western Sichuan) as an area that would require more vigorous state efforts to develop potential gold mines because it was governed by indigenous leaders.88 What these officials were suggesting was a development policy that differed for the borderlands, where natural resources would be militarized and the state would claim a greater role in their exploitation. In other words, as with the educational policies explored in chapter 3, many non-Han communities would be denied participation in local affairs and control over local resources. The diverging approaches to development in the borderlands and China proper were justified by fears of foreign imperialism and supported by a new set of national mining regulations that expanded the state’s power to claim mineral deposits. These regulations were based on Qing officials’ increasing knowledge about other nations’ mining laws and were designed to protect sovereign

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control over national resources. The new mining regulations effectively allocated to the state the first claim to any mineral deposits, giving the government substantial power to intervene locally.89 As the state sought to take control of mining in Kham, Zhao Erfeng promoted the idea of the region as rich in minerals and ordered machinery for mechanizing production in the Dartsedo-Litang corridor. In a story that would become familiar across the borderlands, the machinery arrived in Chengdu well after Zhao’s departure and was never effectively installed. Still, under Zhao’s supervision, twenty-five mines were opened in Kham, and the idea of Kham as a mineral-rich territory was created, leading to future efforts to create mining corporations in the Republican era (1912–1949).90 These efforts were both facilitated and hampered by the political wreckage that Zhao wrought. After the 1911 revolution, remnants of imperial troops were reorganized into the Sichuan-Kham Defense Force. They were funded initially by the Sichuan provincial government, and over the course of the Republican period, these soldiers would at times provide a means for Sichuanese and Yunnanese to wield power in Kham.91 By 1927, the Defense Force came to be controlled by the Sichuanese warlord Liu Wenhui, who would use them to build a base in Kham. Liu did so by drawing from some of the ideas first developed in 1904–1905: exercising direct control over local governance, capturing the profits from local resources by developing state-run corporations to manage them, and claiming the right to land and then leasing mining and other rights to private firms. Liu’s power was uneven across Kham, however, and he frequently encountered local challenges as well as Khampa self-rule movements.92 Thus, there were different experiences of Liu’s authoritarian ways, with the East—Drakteng, Dartsedo, Litang, Kardzé (Ganzi), Tawu, and even Batang—being subjected to the brunt of Liu’s efforts to impose a new, more powerful form of authority. These were places where Liu had the power to raise revenues, impose Chinese schooling, and station troops—powers that locals periodically tested.93 Although the nature of Liu Wenhui’s power superficially resembled the patchwork pattern of the Qing system, his regime needed more revenue to support his army and therefore sought a deeper level of fiscal control. He surveyed and taxed smaller mines that the Qing had never bothered to investigate, and he created more elaborate and wide-ranging regulations for the use of transport labor (‘u lag). What was evolving under Liu was an ideal—and sometimes a reality—of greater state control over resources and people, and the creation of state corporations was part of this effort. For example, the regime entered the



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transport business by carving out government ranches where they could raise beasts of burden for the State ‘U lag Agency (Guan yu wula shiwusuo) and for the Xikang Animal Transport Company (Mu yun gongsi). Although the transport company failed, the state-owned ranch did not, and state-run livestock management became a reality in parts of Kham.94 Liu’s regime often couched its effort to dominate local resources in the discourse of development, and it created corporate entities to implement that discourse. For example, the state promoted the creation of a number of largeand small-scale companies for exploiting Kham’s gold-mining territories. Some companies were well capitalized, and some were smaller-scale operations, but all were subject to new state claims on land and resources. The state itself put efforts into promoting state-private mining concerns, including a gold-mining company in the Muli area placed under the control of the Xikang Gold Mining Bureau (Xikang jinkuang ju). In order to begin its operations in Muli, moreover, the bureau wrested control of mining from the local monastic elite.95 Liu Wenhui’s efforts to survey Kham’s mineral deposits continued earlier efforts to create an archive of information on regional natural resources. In Zhao Erfeng’s time, the surveys provided the knowledge needed for directly governing Kham. After Zhao’s demise, his successors continued to probe more deeply into Khampa society. In spring 1916, for instance, the state surveyed one of the villages near Litang, collecting for the first time detailed information on population, grain production, and the number of cattle and sheep.96 This process of surveying accelerated into the 1930s, as the Nationalist government resurrected an earlier Qing plan to make Kham into the new province of Xikang, a plan that was accomplished on January 1, 1939. While some Khampas resisted the efforts of outsiders to impose control,97 the contours of local commercial life were increasingly quantified and recorded.98 As Xikang Province was established, the surveys were designed to facilitate grand programs for development. A provincial agricultural improvement institute (Xikangsheng nongye gaijinsuo) was established with the lofty goals of pulling the Kham region out of poverty through the implementation of a fiveyear strategy.99 Enthusiasm and optimism permeate these plans, and it was assumed that the planners could adapt to local ecological and cultural conditions, just as, notes one report, the Anglo-Saxons did in building the British Empire and the Slavs did in building the Soviet Union. From the plans and language, it is clear that the planners imagined Kham as a colonial territory providing China with raw materials and resources, as

118 From Muleteers to Millionaires

did the colonies of other empires. For example, Kham was to be the supplier of military rations, including meat, allowing the state to cut down on imports. Other development schemes included an elaborate plan for opening land in each of Xikang’s counties, and in 1943, model land reclamation districts were created in Taining and Dartsedo. The work was to be done in combination with each county’s local government, the local Agriculture and Forestry Development Agency (Nong Lin jianshe jiguan), and the local department designed to increase grain production (liangshi zhengzhang zong zhidao chu). Together these institutions would guide (dudao) the opening of thousands of acres in twenty counties for planting grain.100 Many of these plans were not achieved of course, but if we return to Peldengyel’s home of Drakteng, we can measure the changes that both private companies and state institutions did accomplish. In 1913, Drakteng had been transformed into a directly ruled county, and over the decades, the state undermined the power of local indigenous elites. By the early 1930s, the old hereditary elite still wielded some influence, but the Republican state was able to implement some of its developmental policies. The state collected local taxes, enforced compulsory transport corvée service, and even created an experimental agricultural station that controlled some of the agricultural land. Locally, commerce came to be concentrated in the hands of Han shopkeepers, who imported tea, cloth, and European products, most likely buying these goods from firms such as Yongchangxiang and Maoheng. They also exported to Dartsedo musk, beimu, and other medicines that had been collected by Khampas and bartered in return for tea, cloth, tools, and salt. For the most part, then, it was the state, the shopkeepers, and the larger private firms that mediated Drakteng’s interaction with the larger commercial world. Locally, Han settlers dominated commerce and the skilled professions (carpentry, wine making, silversmithing) despite the fact that in the mid-1930s, they were fewer than 10 percent of the population. Khampa livelihoods continued to revolve around farming, herding, hunting, and collecting medicines. –•– Thus, the outlines of Peldengyel’s life in the early 1950s had already been put in place by the 1930s. The commercial economy was a powerful factor, and though the Chinese Communist Party work teams did not emphasize it, large merchant firms were some of the most powerful commercial forces in Drakteng. Though this was not the case in Peldengyel’s village, Han settlers were



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increasingly prevalent in other parts of Drakteng. The state was a powerful economic force too. It is important to clarify that not all of Kham was like Drakteng and that these developments need not have led inevitably to disempowered development throughout the entire region. In the Republican period, there were still other possible futures. In Litang, for example, Ganden Thubchen Choekhorling Monastery, rebuilt in the wake of the Qing attacks in 1905, regained and then maintained its political and economic influence into the early 1950s. Various institutions within the monastery invested in and managed trade, and the monastery extended its commercial networks through Lhasa into India, as well as into Sichuan and Yunnan.101 It is a testament to the fact that in some places, Khampas still maintained political and economic power. While it is certainly accurate to note how monasteries remained influential in Kham trade networks, it is also important to recognize the growing power of merchant firms and the state. Outside forces, whether private firms or state corporations, were making inroads into Kham and gaining control over resources, leaving locals with less influence over economic changes. In areas such as Litang, moreover, where elite Khampa power endured, it has to be noted that the growing Han Chinese discourses on nation and development cast local secular and religious elites as opponents—as backward figures who were imagined to be obstacles to political and economic modernity. Thus, from the early twentieth century forward, as private firms and state institutions increasingly excluded or disempowered local communities, they were operating simultaneously in the material realm of actual economic and political relationships and in the discursive realm of the ongoing evolution of the Chinese national imaginary. Both would shape not just Kham but the southwestern borderlands as a whole for decades to come. The next three chapters examine how the national imaginary affected industrial planning, thinking about development, and the transformation of state corporations in Yunnan.

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5

Mining

We take Yunnan to be secluded in the Southwest, being stared down by two powerful tigers, In days of old, the province was diseased and poor, but today it approaches destruction, If we desire to save it, then we must first relieve the poverty, If we desire to relieve the poverty, then we must first open mines. —Zhang Kun et al., 1911 petition to abrogate Anglo-French Syndicate mining rights

when the progressive merchants of Burma were just a few years into their struggles against the old guard in western Yunnan and Liu Wenhui was establishing himself in Kham, Miao Yuntai was returned home to Kunming and he was fearful. His return to his birthplace was unavoidable. He had to bury his elder brother who had died in exile in Hong Kong, but the journey home with the coffin was full of danger. Earlier in the year, while the new provincial leader, Long Yun, had struggled to gain control, he had recruited Miao from the Shanghai financial world to direct the failing provincial bank. Miao had returned briefly, but when he found the bank’s finances hopelessly muddled, he fled via Vietnam for Hong Kong. With this event fresh in the past, would he be safe? Miao was uneasy, so he sent a friend as an emissary. What might the consequences be? To Miao’s surprise, Long was not interested in revenge. He wanted Miao, a native Yunnanese, to guide Yunnan’s economic future. But Miao audaciously refused to join one of the existing provincial government departments, which he no longer trusted with Yunnan’s economic future. He had a different vision of state-led development, one in which the directors of state corporations were not bureaucrats but entrepreneurs. In the end, Long and Miao agreed to create a new Department of Agriculture and Mining (Nongkuang IN AUTUMN 1928,

123

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ting), which Miao would direct. Under this plan, Miao would oversee agriculture, commerce, mining and industry, with these portfolios transferred from the Department of Economic Construction (Jianshe ting).1 From this initial position of influence, Miao would become one of the most important figures in Yunnan’s development planning and, although he is not recognized as such, in China’s early industrialization. His preeminence in Yunnan earned Miao great scrutiny over the decades. In Marxist accounts of the 1960s, Miao Yuntai is portrayed as a greedy, powerhungry leader of the bureaucratic capitalist “Miao clique,” his desire to enhance his authority assumed to emanate from his bourgeois class status.2 Later accounts, written after China’s 1979 rediscovery of the seductions of the market, recognize Miao as a significant architect of Yunnan’s modernization.3 Echoing that idea, John Hall’s outstanding study of Yunnan politics portrays Miao as both a powerful bureaucrat who solved Yunnan’s fiscal crisis and a limited figure who offered Long Yun “a new vision of . . . an industrialized and modern society,” but did so by emphasizing quick returns on investment and an uncritical approach to technological transfer.4 While Miao did provide a new vision of state-led economic change, it was a vision, Shi Yun argues, requiring more nuanced investigations that leave behind the rigid Marxist and modernization theory terminologies of earlier scholarship. Shi suggests recapturing the specifics of how Miao and his colleagues designed relatively successful financial systems appropriate to contemporary local developments.5 In her studies, Shi does just that, examining how Miao and others created Yunnan’s provincial banks, especially the Fudian New Bank, established in 1932. In doing so, she contributes to the important work of bringing sophisticated historical narrative back to studies of financial institutions and corporate organization.6 There is room to push further, to dive deep into the historical and cultural contexts shaping the way Miao developed provincial corporations. We know that Miao solved important fiscal and monetary problems, providing a new vision for an industrialized and modern Yunnan. However, Miao’s vision was not simply derivative, a mechanical reproduction of central government or foreign plans. Instead, Miao’s ideas were an original synthesis that emerged from his foreign and domestic experiences as well as his understanding of Yunnan and his knowledge of China’s developmental history. He sought to create state-led institutions that were insulated from government bureaucracy and yet took on bold industrial projects that private capital was unable to pursue. He argued

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that the state should orchestrate economic development in borderlands regions such as Yunnan, but it should do so with institutions that were organized to increase value for shareholders (both state and private) and make profits in competitive marketplaces. In seeking state leadership in industrialization, Miao was far from unique, although he seems to have been consistently ahead of others, including those in the central government’s famed National Resources Commission (NRC), which created and managed many of the central government’s most important industrial enterprises.7 If Miao was not unique in his vision of state-led economic development, he was unique in his emphasis on profitability and value, which was linked to his efforts to build state corporations that maintained autonomy from the government’s basic administrative institutions. In Miao’s contemporary lingo, he sought to “differentiate between administrative institutions (xingzheng jigou) and enterprise institutions (shiye jigou).”8 Miao, as we will see, used corporate management organizations that gave the general managers autonomy over running the business. In contrast, the NRC granted little autonomy to its enterprises, meaning that the companies were tied to the state bureaucracy in ways that theoretically reduced efficiency and profit.9 As we look back from the twenty-first century, Miao’s approach seems prescient, anticipating as it did some of the major changes in China’s post-1979 reform period: greater autonomy for factory managers, an emphasis on profitability and efficiency, and an effort to incorporate under Company Law.10 From the time he took the reins of the new Department of Agriculture and Mining, in other words, Miao was seeking to break free of existing organizational approaches, which, since the 1860s, had emphasized state bureaucratic oversight of modern economic institutions.11 In doing so, Miao offered Yunnan—and China—a possible alternative to the state enterprise system emerging under the Nationalist Party and NRC. One of the key reasons that he could offer such an alternative was that he had grown up in the borderlands. As Shi Yun recommends, then, I place Miao within the context of his times while recognizing that those times were created by specific historical trajectories. Born in 1894, educated in the new turn-of-the-century school system, and exposed to cosmopolitan experiences, Miao shared some life experiences with the transnational merchants of western Yunnan. Later in his government career, he would draw on the Maoheng firm to support Kunming’s first mechanized cotton mills, and he would hire and mentor Yongchangxiang founder Yan Zizhen’s son, Yang Kecheng, who would, under the searing pressure of the

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1950s, turn against Miao. In important ways, Miao was a man of his times, as were the progressive merchants of western Yunnan. But just as the merchants were shaped by longer-term historical trajectories, so was Miao. Miao inherited the long-standing and powerful vision, dating back to 1876, of mechanizing Yunnan’s mining industry. Over time, this vision was passed on to new generations and morphed into a dream of mining as a crucial state-led developmental and civilizing vehicle for poor, diverse, peripheral Yunnan. In the 1880s, when the first state-orchestrated mining corporation was created, the notorious governor-general, Cen Yuying, had linked mining to prosperity for Yunnanese: “The Earth’s benefits should not be left in the ground when they could be invested in the people,” he argued.12 By 1911, when Zhang Kun, cited in the epigraph, was petitioning the court to buy back from foreigners the rights to Yunnan minerals, mechanized mining was not only seen as an issue of national sovereignty; it had come to be closely associated with the dreams of lifting Yunnanese out of poverty and civilizing the allegedly backward borderlands peoples (bianyi), who, according to one official, were “stupid, easily misled, and hard to enlighten.”13 To probe the development of such issues, this chapter and the next two focus on economic planning and state corporations, beginning with an emphasis on mining. A history of mining, when placed in larger intellectual, political, and cultural contexts, is illuminating because the industry witnessed the most significant early efforts to mechanize production in the Southwest, as well as important efforts to extend state control over mineral resources and the people who lived near them, especially non-Han communities. Through these efforts, we can measure important changes in ideas about development, economy, and human difference. Of course, we know already that Qing officials considered early industrial development to be a means for state strengthening, and we know that mining and railway rights movements helped foster nationalism and political activism in Yunnan and around the empire.14 Thanks to Shellen Xiao Wu’s recent work, moreover, we also know that Chinese views of mineral resources were changing in the late Qing, influenced by encounters with imperialism and modern science. Officials came to believe that extending state power over mineral resources was a way to protect and develop state sovereignty.15 We also know that more radical, globally engaged intellectuals such as Zheng Guangying and Liang Qichao soon developed carefully considered arguments for pursuing industrialization. To prevent foreigners from stealing China’s wealth, they argued, the

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Qing state must wage trade wars and win for Chinese the right to control commerce and industry in China. These ideas spurred on cooperative public and private investment in firms such as the Kaiping coal mines, China Merchants’ Steamship, and the cotton textile factories promoted by Li Hongzhang.16 In a sense, then, chapters 5 to 7 retell a familiar account of early state initiatives to industrialize China, a story that has been told and retold for more than half a century.17 However, previous scholars have rarely considered carefully what it means to write a history of China.18 In the past, they have often allowed privileged regions to represent the whole. The events and people in Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou, or elsewhere in China proper (neidi) become Chinese and their histories become the modern Chinese past. Other places are marginalized, and this is especially true of borderlands regions such as Yunnan. This is not unique to Chinese history, of course. In American history, it was once common to use the Northeast and middle-class white men to evoke national experiences.19 In Chinese history, it is the interior (neidi), which, at most, is half of China’s geographical space, and the urban Han whose experiences have most often represented modern China. Using eastern China, especially Shandong, as a stand-in for all of China, for example, Wu reveals important changes in approaches to natural resources. But what happens when we examine the intersection of mining and economic development in China’s borderlands? What if we draw from the inspiration of new business histories to broaden approaches to corporate institutions and include an appreciation for how representations of space and race may influence policy and institution building? What if we realize that China’s history, including its history of economic development, is incomplete when written only from east to west? What if we investigate trends that moved from west to east?20 Chapters 5 to 7 examine modern mining and the corporate conquest of Yunnan, with the goal of thinking about the intersections of technology, environment, development, and ideas about spatial and human difference. This work draws on the now well-established intellectual traditions of thinking critically about state building and economic development as both discourses and actions that shape representations of space and the institutions that govern them. And it emphasizes that the processes of state building, including the building of state-run corporations, will be different across China’s vast and historically diverse regions. In his work, Patrick Joyce has argued that modern states are assemblages, meaning that they are “outcomes or achievements, often insecure ones” created

128 The Place of the State

by the accumulation of historical developments.21 In his work on China’s staterun economy, Morris Bian echoes Joyce in arguing that the state enterprise system of the Communist period was not a result of transplanting the Soviet planning apparatus, but was the long-term outcome of combining Chinese and imported practices from the 1860s forward.22 If Joyce and Bian are correct, the history of any one modern state may broadly resemble others, but because each state’s accumulation of historical developments is unique, it will also differ in important ways. If national states can be assemblages, then what about the early twentieth century in China when, for long periods, there was no effective centralized state and provincial governments were creating their own state assemblages? Might each province or region be approached as a potentially differing assemblage? And might the assemblages look different in borderlands provinces, where race, concepts of backwardness, and a dearth of capital played larger roles than in China proper and other Han-dominated regions? This is the argument of Judd Kinzley, who states that in Xinjiang, state-led development was layered, meaning that beginning with the late Qing, successive states inherited, modified, and built on the infrastructure of previous regimes, creating “a disjointed, mish-mash of . . . institutions.”23 We will find that the same is true of Yunnan, where Miao Yuntai built on earlier layers to create an assemblage with important ramifications for all of China. In this and the next two chapters, the ideas of development are problematized and not simply accepted as systematic, progressive, and centralized.24 In particular, the chapters investigate mechanization of industry in Yunnan, revealing it to be a difficult, mostly failure-prone process. To do this, the chapters are divided chronologically, with this chapter covering the 1870s through the 1910s, chapter 6 returning to Miao Yuntai and his remarkable leadership in the 1920s and 1930s, and chapter 7 introducing important developments in the wartime and postwar eras (1938–1949). –•– In 1874, two decades before Miao Yuntai’s birth, large parts of Yunnan Province lay in ruins, its populations scattered or dead and its key trade towns decimated. In a report to the throne, Governor-General Cen Yuying noted that the population decline was caused by brutal fighting during the Panthay Rebellion (1856–1873). A rugged militia commander from western Guangxi, Cen knew of what he spoke, having personally effected some of the population de-

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cline. After luring rebel generals to a banquet near Dali, Cen had them killed in cold blood before unleashing his troops on the city, where they massacred, by Cen’s estimate, ten thousand men, women, and children.25 For Cen and his colleagues, the killing of so many people was lamentable not because they felt remorse but because it created a fiscal crisis. Who was left to pay the taxes supporting Cen’s troops? For Cen Yuying, the immediate goal in 1874 was to pay and feed his soldiers, lest he lose control of them. Where would he find the revenue? Cen knew that Yunnan’s copper mines had flourished in the past, so he turned initially to ideas from earlier times, encouraging private firms to mine while exercising state control over purchasing and transport. By embracing the copper mining industry, Cen Yuying was clearly trying to build on tradition, but he was also acutely aware of living in a world with new possibilities and new pressures—and he was not alone. In 1876, the new governor-general, Liu Changyou, inherited Cen’s problems, and in response, he issued a bold request to borrow the equivalent of 3 million taels (ounces of silver) from foreign banks to purchase machinery for mechanizing Yunnan mining. Liu envisioned that the profits from the venture could help pay Yunnan’s soldiers.26 Liu’s ideas and language reveal a perception of the Qing place in the world as precarious, with borderlands regions particularly vulnerable. He noted how foreigners coveted Yunnan’s mineral wealth, and he worried that mining profits might end up in the hands of the French and British, for Liu had one eye on French Indochina and another on the expanding British colony in Burma. In this, Liu was startlingly prescient: it was not until the mid-1880s that the French would conquer northern Vietnam, including Hanoi, and the British would invade Upper Burma. Still, Liu foresaw this, and by the turn of the new century, he was proven correct as an Anglo-French consortium began surveying Yunnan for tin deposits. Liu’s ideas for mechanizing the Yunnan mining industry would also come to pass, but they would require a longer gestation period. The dream of mechanizing Yunnan mining was born with Liu Changyou who, pointing to mechanized ordnance production on the coast, argued for bringing Chinese mechanics from the Jiangnan Arsenal or the Fujian Shipyard to install machinery for processing Yunnan ore. The reason for doing so, Liu argued, was strategic. Like Cen Yuying, Liu argued that Yunnan desperately needed to pay the soldiers who guarded the empire’s “screens” (weiping) or “hedges” (fanli), meaning the borderland regions that protected the heartland.27 At the moment, noted Liu, the hedges, including Yunnan, were vulnerable to

130 The Place of the State

foreign encroachment. Initially, then, the industrialization of Yunnan mining was conceived in strategic terms. Liu Changyou desired to use economic and political change to consolidate Qing rule in the borderlands, and these goals placed him in the company of men such as fellow Hunanese Zuo Zongtang, who was just beginning his reconquest of Xinjiang. Both Liu and Zuo had served in the Hunan Army, the militia movement that saved the empire from its midcentury civil wars. In the 1860s, Zuo was dispatched to the Northwest, where he first pacified a major uprising in the near Northwest and then, in 1876, set out for Xinjiang to drive the rebel leader Yaqub Beg from Qing soil. At his command were troops paid for by foreign loans arranged in Shanghai. By 1876, when Liu Changyou was seeking loans to develop Yunnan mining, then, Zuo was arriving in a Xinjiang beyond Qing control for a dozen years. Yaqub Beg and his Central Asian troops had invaded, leaving the region open to British and Russian intrigues, and there was word that the British might establish a protectorate. Meanwhile, the Russians had occupied Yili, Xinjiang’s northwestern area. Zuo had been called in to reverse this catastrophe, and as his armies sped westward in 1877, driving before them the invaders, the aggressive Zuo was already laying plans that would introduce into the empire the debates about sovereignty, the role of borderlands indigenous leaders, and the nature of modern Qing rule (see chapter 4). Zuo’s plans for Xinjiang were couched in a language that resembled Liu Changyou’s discourse on Yunnan. On July 26, 1877, when Zuo sent a memorial requesting provincehood for Xinjiang, Zuo made the case that Xinjiang “screened” the interior from potential attack by foreign powers. Echoing Liu’s terminology, Zuo argued that if Xinjiang was not consolidated, the borderlands peoples would not be peaceful, leaving the rest of the empire vulnerable.28 Like Cen Yuying and then Liu Changyou in Yunnan, Zuo advocated a more aggressive approach to borderlands governance. From the outset, then, new ideas about sovereignty and territory undergirded arguments for a larger state role in the borderlands, and Yunnanese officials were at the forefront of these empirewide discussions that would reach into Taiwan, Mongolia, Tibet, and, as we know, Kham. To be sure, Zuo and Liu were invoking older terminology; it was a language that would have been understood in previous centuries. Yet the men were also acutely aware that they lived in a new age, and in this context, their terminology took on new meanings. For them, the nineteenth century revealed the global imperial pretensions of the great powers, bringing Russian and British pressure

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on Tibet and Xinjiang, Japanese aggression in Korea, and the encroachment of French and British colonial regimes from Indochina and Burma. For Zuo, Liu, and others, these developments provoked a fundamental rethinking of the relationship between the central state and its borderlands. Thus, Zuo had sought to reconfigure central state control through the creation of Xinjiang Province, and in the process, he had repudiated traditional Qing approaches to borderlands governance. It is within this larger context that Zuo’s fellow Hunanese, Liu Changyou, was working in Yunnan, and like Zuo, Liu Changyou both worried about the European predatory empires creeping across Asia and contemplated new strategies to help the Qing regain its equilibrium. As in Xinjiang, economic development was important, although Liu envisioned recovery to revolve around more than migrant farmers and the resurrection of agriculture, which was Zuo’s focus. Thus, Liu was willing to ask for a massive foreign loan to jumpstart a mechanized mining industry. The loans would, in Liu’s mind, be an investment in defending Yunnan against the imperial powers in Indochina and Burma, and he was the first to suggest an expansion of the state’s purview to include state-led industrialization as part of the efforts to bolster Qing sovereignty in the borderlands.29 While Liu’s initial efforts came to naught (fearing more debt, the Ministry of Finance rejected Liu’s proposal), his plan was nevertheless influential. Although Liu’s idea was rejected in 1877, it resurfaced just a few years later, in 1883, as Yunnan officials, like their peers elsewhere, continued to engage modern imperial powers. As the 1880s dawned, the Qing faced a Japanese challenge in Taiwan that led to the creation of Taiwan Province in 1885, only a year after Xinjiang had attained provincial status. With two new provinces, the Qing regime clearly felt the need to replace the older, indirect imperial rule with direct and intensive governing practices in order to keep borderlands territories.30 The Xinjiang and Taiwan cases overlapped with French efforts to establish control in northern Vietnam, which bordered Yunnan and Guangxi Provinces. As French troops moved into the Hanoi area, they initially ran into the remarkable Liu Yongfu, a Hakka rebel from Guangxi Province who had fled the Qing empire after the collapse of the great midcentury uprisings.31 In the Red River region, Liu had flourished, establishing an informal regime that reached to Hanoi. When Henri Laurent Rivère led two hundred troops to occupy Hanoi in spring 1882, not only did he provoke Liu and his irregulars, the Black Flags, into defensive action, so too did he catch the eye of the Qing central government.

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Alerted to the French danger, the Qing supported the Black Flags and deployed troops into northern Vietnam, a move sometimes characterized as an example of how the Qing were traditionalists who failed to understand international law.32 More recent archival work, however, suggests that the Qing actions were guided by an emerging understanding of both international law and modern imperialism. In 1882 and 1883, for example, just as the Vietnam crisis was unfolding, the Qing embarked on a decidedly modern, imperial venture in Korea.33 The initial architect of an informal empire in Korea was none other than Li Hongzhang, who, while instrumental in reorienting relations with Korea, was reluctant to commit similar levels of resources to continental borderlands, a stance made clear in 1875 when he opposed the efforts to regain Xinjiang. When it came to northern Vietnam, Li was equally ambivalent, and in the winter of 1882–1883, he sat down with the French minister to China, Frédéric Albert Bourée, and hammered out a framework for bringing peace to the Vietnam-China border. But peace would come at a cost: Qing troops would withdraw from northern Vietnam, and there would be a treaty port established at the border, allowing the French commercial access to the Southwest. In return, Li secured French agreement to divide Vietnam’s Red River region into two zones: a Chinese protectorate to the north and a French protectorate in the south.34 What is fascinating about the Chinese-language version of this agreement is its articulation of a clear-cut division of sovereignty and suzerainty in a region that had long seen overlapping and, by modern standards, unclear imperial claims. No longer would there be ambiguity, and informal powers, such as Liu Yongfu’s Black Flags, would be, theoretically at least, eradicated as the border was demarcated.35 The Li-Bourée convention foreshadowed a change in the southwestern borderlands because it provided a new vision of state power as precisely defined by linear borders, zones of influence, and commercial treaties. Still, the convention was ultimately rejected because men such as Cen Yuying, who had been recalled to Yunnan, did not think it protected Qing interests. In his comments, Cen Yuying echoed the type of thinking that punctuated Zuo Zongtang’s reconfiguration of Xinjiang, as well the Qing informal empire in Korea, arguing that the Li-Bourée agreement eroded Qing influence in Vietnam and left open the possibility that the French might profit from Yunnan mines.36 In early 1883, the proposal was therefore rejected, as were later Qing-French negotiations, and the Qing blustered into a war with France that ended with Vietnam falling under French protection.37

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In the past, it has been argued that the Qing-French conflict led to little change in Qing thinking, although it was acknowledged that a small cadre of intellectuals began to question the strictly military focus of Qing self-strengthening, urging a broader program of economic modernization and political innovation.38 But these older interpretations have underestimated the importance of this era. More recent work finds in this era the origins of Chinese thinking about economic development. Chinese economic thinkers began to link clusters of ideas together, including evolutionary thinking, industrialization, and progress toward modern nationhood.39 In the borderlands, several other ideas were added to this cluster, including the need to establish sovereignty under international law and, based on Zuo’s work in Xinjiang and the emerging thinking in Kham, absolute control over non-Han communities. These ideas influenced not just an intellectual elite but key policymakers.40 In 1883, after his transfer back to Yunnan, Cen Yuying understood that he was operating in a new political climate. After the Sino-French war, a defined border was demarcated in a rancorous process that provided the Qing with insights into the ways that the colonial powers prized territory and clear authority. At this time, Cen was forced to confront the issues of imperialism and territorial power because, in addition to French advances in Indochina, the British conquered Upper Burma in 1886. Cen deployed soldiers along the strategic routes from Burma into Yunnan.41 He also sought to undermine local indigenous rule in order to strengthen Qing claims to territorial sovereignty, and in 1888 the court accepted his proposal to establish a new fort and administrative center to replace an indigenous jurisdiction.42 For Cen Yuying, the issues of control over the people and territories of the borderlands were linked to his concern for economic development and protection of Chinese rights. As Cen expanded direct state control over borderlands communities, his work was complemented by the efforts of others. In preparation for demarcating the Burma-China border, Xue Fucheng, the Qing plenipotentiary who would sign a Sino-British convention on the boundary, asked Yunnan officials to explore the physical and cultural geography of the frontier. He sought concrete information about landscapes and communities, including customs and local histories of indigenous groups.43 As the demarcation negotiations unfolded, however, Qing officials learned that they were still far behind the British in mobilizing the geographical and historical knowledge needed to claim territory. For instance, the British used information gleaned by several generations of explorers to gain advantage. In one instance, they claimed that two Tai

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territories under Qing rule had traditionally provided tribute to Burma and therefore belonged to Burma. The Qing disputed the claim until Cen Yuying’s successor investigated and found it to be true.44 In response to these experiences, Cen and his successors not only sought to increase their surveys and collection of knowledge about border areas; they also turned again to the idea of developing mines as a way to increase revenue and demonstrate state control over local resources. As Cen contemplated a second effort to reinvigorate mining, he was no longer content to rebuild the industry along eighteenth-century lines. Instead, he joined Liu Changyou in advocating for mechanization and thus turned to the new concept of the statesupervised (guandu shangban) joint-stock company, first employed with the China Merchants’ Steam Navigation Company in 1872. Drawing on the precedents of China Merchants’ and the Kaiping mines, Cen and his colleague, Tang Jiong, proposed a new Bureau for Recruiting Merchant Investment in Yunnan Mining (Yunnan kuangwu zhaoshangju), which was to marshal state funds and seek private capital. Like China Merchants’, which was designed to compete with foreign steamship companies, Yunnan Mining was to compete with foreigners who might seek access to Yunnan minerals.45 As they set about establishing Yunnan Mining, Cen and Tang developed three important arguments. Their first was that the project would benefit both state and people by allowing the Qing and its subjects, rather than greedy foreigners, to gain access to the rich minerals.46 In other words, natural resources were for the state and its people to develop. The second argument was that they needed to search far outside the province for private capital because neither the state coffers nor private capital within the province was sufficient. Despite the growing wealth of the private Yunnanese trading firms, there was little effort to mobilize Yunnanese capital, and this emphasis on bringing in outside money provided the origins of modern China’s orientation toward outsider control over borderland resources and peoples. Finally, Cen and Tang wanted to develop a mining enterprise that would use Western technologies.47 Although they did not know it, they were initiating a task that would take decades to accomplish. The task would require the coordination of finance, technology, and labor, and each process required the development of special knowledge adapted to the particular conditions of Southwest China. From the outset, the first step, raising capital, proved difficult, particularly in the early 1880s after the collapse of the Shanghai stock exchange. In an 1884

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memorial, Cen admitted that recruiting investors was tough as firms in Shanghai and Hankou were going bankrupt.48 Two years later, in 1886, Tang Jiong reported that share sales had reached 700,000 taels, but paid-up capital was 20,000 taels at most. The lack of liquidity was particularly frustrating because in a society that had been decimated by the Panthay uprising, the purchase of labor-saving machinery took on a new urgency.49 To address the problems, Tang turned to the tactics that had helped China Merchants’ reorganize in 1873: he recruited a merchant manager and offered shareholders input into running the business. As a result, Tang turned certain responsibilities over to Wang Chi, a Yunnanese businessman who ran the lucrative Tianshunxiang firm, which had a business footprint across the empire. Wang’s firm would recruit investors from outside Yunnan, handle the bookkeeping, and disperse the annual dividend, which, at 6 percent, was well below the 10 percent dividend that had initially made China Merchants’ popular with investors. Those who bought into Yunnan Mining would gain corporate governance rights corresponding to the amount of their investment.50 Anticipating more capital, Tang purchased equipment and engaged two Japanese mining technicians. By 1888, machinery and technicians had arrived in northeast Yunnan.51 The technicians, Yamada Kinichi and Fujino Kozo, each earned a monthly salary of 250 silver dollars.52 By March 1889, the Yunnan Mining project was six years old, and the throne wondered when the mines would begin producing. Tang Jiong was unable to provide an encouraging answer. The project engineers, Yamada and Fujino, suffered from the difficulties of life in northeast Yunnan, often falling ill and thus slowing the work. It was concluded that more expensive technology was needed, and Tang requested the purchase of machines for tunneling, ventilation, and sluicing.53 As the losses increased and production failed to meet expectations, this first venture into industrializing Yunnan mining ran out of capital.54 Even as Yunnan Mining was closing, however, a number of changes were taking place to make industrialized mining a project worthy of ongoing consideration. One of these was embodied in the humble tin can, which, when Australian meats began to be packaged in tins, slowly infiltrated households around the world. By the end of the century, when people ate Canadian salmon, California fruit, and Malayan pineapple from tins, the mining of tin had grown in leaps and bounds. It is estimated that in 1805, about 4,000 tons of tin were produced in the United Kingdom; by 1891, that amount had increased to

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586,000 tons. As consumers came to associate tin with modernity, Chinese came to realize that Yunnan had a potential global commodity if only it could be mined in enough quantity and refined to a high enough degree of purity.55 In southern Yunnan’s Gejiu region, tin had been one of many ores mined for centuries. By the Qing period, miners had adapted their tin mining, washing, and refining to local realities. Amassing capital was challenging; thus, Gejiu mine operators, like other Qing mine owners, frequently organized on the small scale, without the use of expensive, capital-intensive equipment.56 A second reality—the nature of southern Yunnan’s geology and climate—also supported small-scale, seasonal tin mining. As Gejiu miners sank their shafts into the limestone intrusions overlaying the region’s granite substrata, they had little fear of groundwater, even at depths of three thousand or more feet. If the miners encountered water, they installed inexpensive, square-pallet chain pumps commonly used for agricultural irrigation. Without the need for expensive machinery or large staffs, Gejiu mines were run relatively cheaply, which was particularly important in a region where substantial rainfall came only with the summer monsoons. These rains were crucial to concentrating the tin ore before refining, and since concentrating was feasible only with substantial water, miners often finished their work by May, when, they hoped, the rains would begin and the concentrating and refining processes would be managed with a smaller workforce. With the rains on the way, the ore was separated from waste by hammering, which produced a gravelly mix. Tougher pieces of rock could be ground with millstones. The tin ore was then further concentrated by using pans, sluices, and buddles, in which ore was washed with water and further separated from its waste.57 Since the various processes of tin mining and concentrating were conducted in a context in which both capital and rainfall were inconstant, mining was a seasonal, lowtechnology business. As global demand for tin increased, the French and British became increasingly interested in Gejiu tin. From Paris and Hanoi, authorities orchestrated an 1897 survey of Yunnan minerals, as well as possible rail routes from Haiphong into Yunnan.58 The next year, as part of a broader agreement, the French secured the right to build a railway from the China-Vietnam border to Kunming, although the efforts to attract financing and political support in Paris would take until 1901, the same year that an Anglo-French mining concern, the Yunnan Syndicate (Longxing gongsi), began its quest to secure mining rights in Yunnan. The Yunnan leg of the railway would eventually span 465 rugged

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kilometers that required 3,422 bridges and 150 tunnels. The railway was part of a plan for French economic dominance in China’s Southwest, as was the exploitation of minerals, and it would eventually become the most profitable within the Indo-Chinese rail system. Their efforts to mine Gejiu’s tin, however, would be thwarted by the Yunnanese.59 –•– It all started with great promise for the Yunnan Syndicate. Although there were several periods of unrest when locals targeted foreign involvement in mining and commerce, the syndicate found cooperative Qing officials who negotiated a sixty-year lease for access to Yunnan’s minerals.60 From 1903 to 1906, the syndicate surveyed potential mining sites, and in 1906, a subsidiary, the Lin’an Company, sent a young Welshman, William Collins, into the Gejiu region to negotiate mining leases. According to Collins, when he sought to negotiate with one landowner, Min Lisong, the local Qing official had Min and his son arrested and eventually convicted of trying to sell land illegally. Collins pleaded for the legality of the transaction, but local officials, with the support of Yunnan Governor-General Xiliang, thwarted the Lin’an Company by helping Chinese stake claims to mines that the company sought to lease.61 Opposition to the Lin’an Company mirrored movements across the Qing empire.62 Like other mining rights initiatives in China, the Yunnan movement originated among students in Japan, including Tengchong’s Li Genyuan. It spread to domestic students in Kunming and then to other sectors of the population. By the time William Collins returned to the Gejiu area in 1910, he found a well-organized opposition movement with ties to officialdom and the merchant community. A voluntary organization, the Mining Investigation Society, had mobilized to prevent foreigners from gaining access to local mines.63 This society was able to gain coverage in the Kunming newspapers and appeal to Yunnanese to buy shares in Chinese mining companies as a way to protect Yunnan’s mineral wealth.64 Thus, when the Yunnan Syndicate extended its geological surveys beyond the tin fields in Gejiu to the antimony deposits in southeast Yunnan, word spread rapidly, and there soon emerged what Collins called a “semi-official antimony mining monopoly.”65 What Collins considered to be a semiofficial mining monopoly was actually a firm that would eventually be incorporated as the Baohua Antimony Mining Stock Company, Ltd. The Baohua Company first gained momentum in fall 1908 among Kunming investors who joined a small wave of efforts to create mining

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firms that would protect Yunnan’s resources from foreigners. The firm soon attracted Governor-General Xiliang’s support, which was not surprising.66 In his previous role at the helm of Sichuan Province, Xiliang had come to appreciate the power of industry, and he had promoted new manufacturing initiatives. At the same time, he had been wary of allowing merchants sole leadership in economic development.67 Xiliang’s suspicion of merchant-led industrialization probably explains why the Baohua Company was given access to government loans and tax breaks, and why, by 1910, it had left behind its status as a private firm and was registered under the 1904 Company Law as a state-merchant joint venture (guan shang heban). Even after Xiliang’s departure, the firm continued to grow. In early 1910, it attracted investment from a Hunan mining company that also sold Baohua access to mechanized refining technology.68 Machinery was imported, and production began in 1913, with the German firm Carlowitz handling the export and sales of Baohua’s antimony.69 While Baohua represented one of a number of small state-merchant mining initiatives, it was capitalized at only 250,000 taels. Tin had the potential for much greater returns, and it was tin that the syndicate really wanted—and that Yunnanese activists were determined to protect. As early as 1905, therefore, a joint state-merchant firm, Gejiu Mining, Ltd. (Ge chang guanshang youxian gongsi), was formed in order to gain control over tin exports. Capitalized at 666,000 taels, Gejiu Mining initially focused on purchasing tin from local producers and shipping it to Hong Kong for processing. This strategy changed, however, once it was learned that the Anglo-French Lin’an Company would build refining facilities. In response, Xiliang dispatched the mining intendant Wang Kuisheng to Southeast Asia to learn about smelting tin. In 1909, the Gejiu Mining corporation was renamed and restructured to increase capitalization (to more than 1.7 million taels) and manage the complex tasks of mechanized tin refining. The government bureaucrat Wang was installed as the company’s general manager. He worked under the supervision of the board of directors, three of whom were chosen by the state and two by the merchant investors. The newly named Gejiu Tin (Gejiu xiwu gufen youxian gongsi) was a limited liability joint-stock corporation organized into multiple divisions for management, engineering, mining, smelting and refining, and business operations. The firm maintained representative offices in Kunming, Haiphong, and Hong Kong.70 With Xiliang’s help, Gejiu Tin became a major part of consolidating stateled development in the Southwest and establishing sovereignty over territory and natural resources. Xiliang’s leadership was significant because of his

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experience with the issues of foreign imperialism and economic development. He had arrived in Yunnan in 1907 from Sichuan, where he had served as governor-general and had, under the increasing pressure of British influence in Tibet, been forced to oversee major transformations of state power. Early in his tenure in Sichuan, Xiliang had complied with imperial orders to establish a Bureau to Encourage Manufacturing (Quanyedao), and he had sent twenty students to Japan to learn modern silk manufacturing techniques. Xiliang was interested in economic rights and consolidating state power, but he did not possess a radically transformative vision of a new China.71 Events, however, have a way of forcing one’s hand, and Xiliang was caught between the British invasion of Lhasa in 1903–1904 and the broader movement to extend central government power into the borderlands, described in chapter 4. At first, says Roger Des Forges, Xiliang had ignored the invasion of Lhasa, even refusing military aid to the Qing resident in Tibet. He had also pushed back against plans for Han colonization of Kham.72 As the pressure from the national and Sichuanese press mounted, however, Xiliang became more aggressive in Kham by making claims to local resources and territories. He promoted the development of gold mines in the Khampa-ruled territories of Nyarong, despite opposition from Lhasa and the local Khampa elite. Still, Xiliang resisted more extreme proposals, such as calls to eradicate the power of monasteries.73 After the Qing court dispatched Zhao Erfeng to implement his colonial doctrines in Kham, Xiliang was pushed out as the court seemed to favor Zhao’s radicalism and later was transferred to Yunnan. In Yunnan, Xiliang drew from his Sichuan experiences, and although he never fully embraced Zhao Erfeng’s radicalism, his administration paid careful attention to both increasing the state’s role in mining and extending its reach into borderland communities.74 Under Xiliang, a number of indigenous leaders were removed from power and their domains reorganized as directly administered districts. Still, Xiliang refused to bow to pressure from Yunnanese officials at court who urged the removal of western Yunnan’s powerful Tai leaders, although he did place the Ganyai leader, Dao Anren, under surveillance. (This did not, however, prevent Dao from joining the Revolutionary Alliance or from hiring Japanese consultants to plan development schemes and provide weapons for his militia).75 Thus, Xiliang’s approach to relations with indigenous rulers was restrained by contemporary standards, but he still participated in the empire-wide movement to link economy, ethnicity, and the expansion of state control.

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As he had in Sichuan, Xiliang promoted important commercial enterprises that lay the foundation for development in the Republican period.76 He was particularly focused on mining and the recovery of mineral rights. Not only did he support the Baohua Antimony Company, he also sent Wang Kuisheng abroad to investigate tin mining and supported Wang’s purchase from Carlowitz of 14 kilometers of cableway, coal-gas-fired industrial machinery for washing and refining tin, and two coal gasification plants. To set up the machinery, Wang brought German engineers to Yunnan, but soon after Gejiu Tin began refining tin ore in earnest, a convergence of Chinese and global politics conspired to shut down operations. The German engineers began work in 1910 and, by 1914, had built the concentration mill, smelting plant, and aerial cableway. On the outbreak of World War I, however, they returned to Germany.77 With the departure of the engineers and the unsettled nature of post-Revolutionary politics, Wang Kuisheng lost power to local mining bosses, who ousted him and connived to have him arrested for embezzlement. Wang was ultimately exonerated, but he died in 1921, a half-dozen years after his German-made machines went idle and were left to rust.78 As Gejiu Tin stumbled into the era of the Great War, the dream of mechanizing mining in Yunnan, first articulated by Liu Changyou in 1876, was largely unrealized. The efforts to bring machinery to copper mining had failed in the 1880s. Wang Kuisheng’s efforts to mechanize tin refining had failed in the early teens. And yet global tin markets continued to grow and Yunnanese output increased to almost 6 percent of the global total. Thanks to the Gejiu area, China became the world’s fourth largest producer of tin, which dominated Yunnan exports, replacing opium after a major suppression campaign went into effect.79 Yunnan tin was a global product, although the production methods remained largely unchanged. –•– As Yunnan tin became a global product, thinking about minerals, territory, and economy continued to change. Starting with Yunnanese students and aided by officials such as Xiliang, mineral resources were increasingly seen through the prism of nationalism and mercantilism—trends sweeping the empire. The push for mining rights recovery in the Southwest, however, differed from other regions in important ways. In Beijing in 1911, Zhang Kun and other Yunnanese officials, cited in the epigraph, joined to petition the court to abrogate the convention that had ceded mining rights to the Yunnan Syndicate, and the Qing

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would ultimately buy back these rights. In their petition, the native Yunnanese noted that at stake were not only economic rights but also a poor, remote province’s future. Yunnan’s minerals, especially tin, were represented as the “headwaters” (xianhe) or the foundation for industrial development and prosperity. This was particularly important for a province “secluded in the Southwest” (pichu Xinan), where poverty and diversity made resources particularly vulnerable to foreigners. Despite Yunnan’s rail links to Southeast Asia, its important role in the global tin industry, and its extensive cosmopolitan cultural links promoted by increasingly mobile merchants, the dominant discourse about Yunnan—even among natives—was one of seclusion and backwardness. The concept of using mining to overcome isolation, alleviate poverty, and spark industrial development revealed a new way of thinking about resources, but the officials and others also tied mining development to issues of sovereignty, the protection of borders, and the extension of state power over indigenous peoples. In chapter 4 on Kham, we learned that the Qing state had urged each province to survey its mineral deposits and recommended that border provinces use more extreme measures than interior provinces for ensuring state control over mines.80 Western Sichuan and Yunnan were singled out as places requiring special attention because of the diversity of border governance, which relied on indigenous institutions.81 What is important about these recommendations is how they differentiated the borderlands from other parts of China. Because non-Han peoples inhabited them and foreign territory abutted them, the borderlands and their resources had to be treated differently. This thinking had shaped the actions of Zhao Erfeng and subsequent leaders in Kham, but it also influenced Yunnan. In 1908, the official who oversaw western Yunnan, a sometime Xiliang confidant named Qin Shusheng, sought investors to open mines in the Tengchong area with the idea that corporate development could be used to stake claim to and protect the border.82 This idea would continue into the Republican period, and five years later, the official overseeing southern Yunnan, Liu Jun, would petition the new military governor to establish a joint merchant-state corporation designed to reopen an old mining region along the Burma border.83 The mining corporation, Liu argued, would help stave off British cooperation with the local Wa (Kawa) people. Liu feared that the British and Wa might conspire against the provincial government, and it was he who, in reference to the Wa, had referred to borderland natives (bianyi) as “stupid, easily misled, and hard to enlighten.” Liu went on to

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compare the Wa to wolves and pigs, and he argued that mining might serve as a civilizing institution, providing the Wa with work, proximity to Han citizens, and a chance to gradually learn Chinese and come to appreciate China. The only way this outcome would be possible, Liu argued, was to develop a mining corporation jointly run by the state and Han merchants.84 Liu’s thinking reveals the important links between economic development and the desire to control people and territory. Borderland communities were considered compromised because their inhabitants were not Han. This, after all, was the era of racialist thinking, when it became increasingly common to argue for the melding of China’s multiple communities into one race—or, at least, into one citizenry.85 In western Yunnan, the provincial government sought to strip indigenous leaders of their power over legal matters through military occupation. It was just a few years later that the provincial government would, with elite merchant help, establish state-run schools that taught non-Han children the principles of Chinese nationalism (see chapter 3). The ultimate goal was to take western Yunnan’s Tai territories, in which the people were considered to be unenlightened (minzhi weikai) and the land largely untamed, and to establish military garrisons, open uncultivated lands, and promote trade.86 Never mind that one Tai saopha had sent boys to Japan to study commerce and that the local towns were already crossroads for trade and new ideas. The discourse was fixed on the backwardness of the region, and that discourse was used to justify the expansion of state power in the form of corporations. Over the decades, the pressure on the region would prove to be relentless—strong enough in 1913, for example, to drive the Nandian saopha into temporary exile in British Burma.87 For Yunnanese Han, modern mining came to be seen as a means to ensure such a melding, taming, and control, and thus a central mechanism for civilizing a poor, ethnically diverse province. And yet there was a catch: no one could make mechanization actually work. First conceived in 1876, the dream of mechanized mining, like the dream of a culturally or racially united China, remained elusive. At the same time, it was such an important concept that various successor states to the Qing continued to pour resources into it, adding layers to the mining institutions and development thinking that emerged in the 1870s and 1880s. But it was not until Miao Yuntai, a native son of Kunming, took the reins of Gejiu’s state-run tin company that some semblance of mechanization would succeed. However, it is important to place Miao’s accomplishments in a broader context of the increasing importance of development discourse, which was used to argue for expanding state power over minerals, land, and

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livelihoods. In the quest to turn the resources under the soil into sovereignty over the ethnically diverse borderlands, Yunnanese would allow the issues of security, development, and ethnicity to shape extraordinary new provincial corporate institutions while also devising elaborate plans for changing indigenous communities. And just as those institutions and plans were beginning to be implemented, the central government, in retreat from the Japanese, would reenter the Southwest with plans of its own.

6

The Technocrat

In remote provinces such as this, it is difficult to run new and rising industries. If the government doesn’t shoulder this responsibility and lead the people, then the development of private industry will be sluggish. —Miao Yuntai in the Record of Yunnan Administration (1943)

to Kunming in 1928 with his brother’s coffin, the situation was grim, and it is not hard to figure out how the military governor, Tang Jiyao, had made such a hash of it. Political instability was rooted in Tang’s armed conflict with another military man, Gu Pinzhen, as the once-cohesive and elite Yunnan Army began to disintegrate.1 Tang and Gu’s civil war stimulated increased military spending at a pace unmatched by revenue collection. By one calculation, from March 1922 to May 1926, the provincial government netted a respectable 28 million Yunnan dollars in revenue, an average of almost 550,000 dollars per month. Yet the government spent more than twice that amount—approximately 57 million dollars, 47 million of which was earmarked for the military.2 By 1929, things were worse, and Yunnan’s dollar, called the old dianbi, was declining against the Hong Kong and Shanghai dollars. Consumers were feeling the sting.3 In ordinary times, a weakening currency would stimulate exports, a potential silver lining. But even as the currency weakened, making Yunnan’s precious tin cheaper and even as global tin prices rebounded from a slump, there still was a decline in tin exports. The truth was that Yunnan production was down, from highs of about eleven thousand tons in 1917 and 1920 to less than six thousand tons in both 1926 and 1927 (see table 1 in the appendix).4 Despite rising global demand and the relative cheapness of Yunnan tin, the countryside WHEN MIAO YUNTAI RETURNED

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around Gejiu was too unstable for sustained and successful mining. Political and economic instability were mutually reinforcing as declining standards of living pushed people over the edge. For too many, banditry felt like the only answer, and it was bandits who frequently threatened the smelting centers in those awful years. In the aftermath of the fighting in Yunnan, it would be Tang’s subordinate, Long Yun, who put the province back together again. Born in the 1880s to an ethnic Yi father and a Han mother, Long was shaped by the proud Yi clans of northeast Yunnan. Those clans, argues Pan Xianlin, had capitalized on the instability of the 1860s and 1870s by supporting Cen Yuying (chapter 5) and, in return, gained local stature through landowning and trade. In the late Qing, clan sons like Long Yun, his cousin Lu Han, and other future leaders such as Lu Chongren attended modern middle schools and entered business.5 In some ways, these communities resembled the Xizhou Minjia families in terms of education and the turn to business, but Long’s remarkable turn of fortune would help boost some of these men to the highest positions in the province. Growing up, Long loved martial arts and fell in with Lu Han and another martial artist. Together, they called themselves the Three Swordsmen, and during their travels, as they perhaps dreamed of the wandering heroes of lore, they stumbled into joining an anti-Qing band that was later absorbed by the Yunnan Army. Long Yun enlisted and eventually enrolled in the Yunnan Military Academy, attracting Tang Jiyao’s attention when he defeated a French boxing instructor in a match.6 From there, Long began a career that was aided by Tang Jiyao, who brought him into his team of bodyguards and promoted him to commander of the Kunming military divisions. It was from that position that Long fought other commanders for control of the province after Tang’s death in 1927, finally gaining some semblance of control in early 1928 when he became chairman of the Provincial Government Committee. As a military man, Long understood the need for revenue and thus for financial reform. With the Yunnan dollar declining and the economy in trouble, he sought repeatedly to develop a new financial framework, and in late 1929, his government began consolidating authority, thus bringing military expenses under control.7 At the same time, a new set of reforms was proposed, including a major restructuring of revenue collection and the end of inflationary currency policies. To add teeth to the new revenue policies, Long assigned his old martial arts buddy and clansman Lu Han to direct the Department of Revenue (Caizheng ting). What was remarkable is that Lu oversaw a revolution in policy

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as the province shed the imperial era’s tax policies. By 1931, Yunnan had eradicated many outdated commercial taxes and surveyed the province’s agricultural lands, resulting in a tripling of the amount of taxable land.8 The new fiscal regime was a turning point. Revenue increased just as military expenses decreased, and five of the next eight years saw balanced budgets (and even budget surpluses). From 1934, moreover, Long Yun’s regime had enough money to increase its nonmilitary spending. In other words, under Long Yun, Yunnanese had some leeway to redefine what the state could and would do.9 To use their contemporary language, they were beginning to build (jianshe) a new Yunnan. The construction of the new Yunnan was controlled locally. The most important initiatives were not national but provincial, making it crucial to understand late Republican state building at the provincial level. Although lacking the same depth of educational experience as Tang Jiyao, Long Yun nevertheless surrounded himself with educated men. His personal secretary had a degree in mining from the United States, and other ministers had been trained in Japan and Europe.10 Balancing the highly educated men were Long’s northeast Yunnan Yi compatriots, including Lu Han and Lu Chongren, who served the province in important positions but also helped link Long to a transprovincial Yi network that, Pan argues, worked to promote elite Yi causes.11 And then there was Miao Yuntai, who had been unsure in 1928 whether Long Yun meant him harm. The son of a soy sauce maker, Miao Yuntai was born into circumstances that made him an unlikely candidate for the degrees of vilification and praise that he would later receive. Was he the mastermind behind his own provincewide system of bureaucratic capitalist control, which at times used “diabolical schemes resembling bloodless murder to plunder the people’s wealth,” as his protégé Yang Kecheng, once accused? Did he once arrange to illegally issue Yunnanese currency that had been secretly printed by the American Bank Note Company in the Bronx and smuggled in through Burma using Yongchangxiang business contacts? Did Miao liberate some 300,000 dollars from public accounts before fleeing for the United States in 1949?12 Or was he a visionary in the practice of developmental economics—worthy of his 2005 designation as one of the ten greatest people in Kunming’s 1,240 years of history?13 To achieve this distinction, had he deployed financial acumen and a characteristically Yunnanese sangfroid to build valuable industries and come closer than anyone else to leveraging Yunnan out of the poverty trap?14 In Miao’s case, the reality was probably closer to visionary.



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Because he has often been viewed through the prisms of changing politics, it is challenging to pin down Miao Yuntai. However, we can come closer to understanding him by sifting through his memoir and placing his thinking in a larger context. Before starting, it is worth stressing a few points. A son of Kunming, Miao shared with many Yunnanese a sense of having been born in a remote, undeveloped region. As Zhang Kun had noted in 1911 (see chapter 5), the province was secluded in the Southwest—or so it was often described, even by educated Yunnanese who nevertheless moved easily around China and Asia.15 Thus, the idea—and not necessarily the reality—of Yunnan as an isolated, backward space informed Miao’s understanding, leading him to see the state, and not private corporations, as the most important catalyst for change. At the same time, Miao was a student of Chinese history, and he was skeptical of earlier state development efforts. Moreover, his experiences in the United States and, later, Shanghai, exposed him to the power of the finance industry and the need to configure corporations of any type to meet the laws of the market. The sum of these experiences shaped Miao, making him a man influenced by the trend after the Great War toward state-led economic planning and a person who thought critically about how best to implement development in his homeland. He also worked within the context of a Yunnan provincial government that included others, such as Lu Chongren, with the ambition to aggressively implement their own development plans. If we recapture this larger context, then Miao’s policies become both more transparent and more impressive. He was creating a set of rationalizations for using the state as the catalyst for economic development in the borderlands. The logic was that Yunnan’s remote, underdeveloped status required state leadership, an argument that continues to shape China today. In Miao’s time, however, his vision of state leadership diverged significantly from that of the central government’s crucial National Resources Commission (NRC) because Miao sought to create, in principle and often in practice, autonomous profit-driven corporations that were not beholden to government bureaucracy. This too has become an idea that shapes China today. –•– Born Miao Jiaming in Kunming, probably in 1894, Miao Yuntai traced his family roots to a predominantly Yi village near the provincial capital, and it is probable that the family was descended from both Han lineages and, like Long Yun, one or more Yi clans. Like so many other Yunnanese, the Miaos claimed,

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probably partly speciously, to be migrants from Nanjing. Whatever the origins of Miao’s ancestors, he considered himself to be Han.16 Though early Communist accounts ridiculed Miao as coming from an elite family (Yang Kecheng mentions portraits of robed and bejeweled ancestors in Miao’s home),17 Miao’s upbringing was modest. His grandfather, father, and oldest brother, each in succession, ran a sauce shop selling homemade pickled vegetables and various sauces, from soy and sesame to vinegar. Miao grew up in the family quarters attached to the shop.18 Miao Yuntai had two older brothers and a sister, and since the sauce shop inheritance was claimed by the first brother, the second brother, Jiashou, opted for enrolling in the Yunnan Military Academy. Through the army, Jiashou made crucial political contacts with the Yunnanese leaders Li Genyuan and Tang Jiyao— contacts that would benefit Yuntai in years to come. After graduation, Jiashou would rise through the military ranks to become a garrison commander and, later, director of the Department of Revenue under Tang Jiyao. Since Jiashou got his start as a garrison commander (weishu siling) and because of his association with his family’s sauce shop, he was sometimes (presumably behind his back) called the Sauce Commander (siling jiang), a pun relying on the similarities in sound between the Chinese words for sauce, on one hand, and commander or general, on the other. In addition to developing strong ties with Tang Jiyao, Jiashou also worked for the ruthless Li Genyuan, one of the Yunnanese heroes of the 1911 Revolution, who held positions in the national government.19 With an older brother and older sister working in the family shop and an older brother taking the increasingly well-trod Yunnanese path to success through the military, Miao Yuntai seemed to have been indulged by his parents. He was born a year after Mao Zedong and, like Mao and others from that generation, he grew up in a rapidly changing China. Like Mao Zedong, Yuntai attended new-style schools that no longer focused on the classics, and it was at school that he adopted the name Yuntai (“Y.T.” in English). Unlike Mao Zedong, however, Yuntai was a superb student and, along with five fellow Yunnanese, earned a provincial government scholarship to the United States, where he was expected to learn skills that would build a better Yunnan. The journey to America was an adventure in itself; Miao had never boarded a train or steamship before riding the narrow-gauge train from Kunming to Vietnam and then embarking from Haiphong for Hong Kong, where he and the others carefully prepared for the ordeal of entering exclusion-era America. The trick was to be immediately recognized as a student—not a Chinese laborer



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banned by U.S. federal law. Students, for instance, were thought to have money and cosmopolitan (that is, Western) tastes, so Miao and his comrades bought first-class trans-Pacific tickets and Western-style clothes. They also endured medical exams in which, as Miao put it, “they examined our eyes and our shit to make sure we were not infected with granular conjunctivitis [trachoma] or hookworm [anchylostomiasis].” One Yunnanese colleague would be held back until his hookworm was cured.20 After an enjoyable ocean voyage featuring dim sum dinners with other Chinese passengers, Miao landed in the United States and, with his Yunnanese cohort, made his way to Southwestern College in Winfield, Kansas, which Miao remembered fondly as a place where professors hosted students in their homes on Sundays. Unlike San Francisco, where race relations were toxic, Miao found few whites in Winfield to be openly prejudiced against the Chinese students. After a year of general study at Southwestern, the Yunnanese moved to larger universities with programs in literature or law, agriculture, and mining or metallurgy. Thus, two Yunnanese students headed into literature and law, one at Columbia and one at Chicago. A third student headed to Cornell for agriculture studies. One student enrolled in Lehigh for metallurgy. And Miao went first to Illinois, where he may have been baptized into the Methodist Church,21 and then to the University of Minnesota to pursue a degree in mining, with a specialty in mineral resources (see figure 2).22 While Miao was in the United States, he gained experience working in an iron mine and then, after graduating from Minnesota in 1918 or 1919 with a bachelor of arts rather than a degree from the University of Minnesota’s School of Mines as originally planned,23 he went to work in New York for a steel company, although which one is unclear. In the fateful year of 1919, Miao returned to China just as the Great War was being settled and Chinese were rebelling against the Versailles peace settlements. Back in Yunnan, Miao turned to his family contacts, using his brother’s connections with Tang Jiyao, who assigned him to run Gejiu Tin.24 It is unclear whether the Yunnan government was aware that Miao’s degree was not from the University of Minnesota’s School of Mines. When Miao arrived in Gejiu in November 1920, he found the tin company in terrible shape, despite Wang Kuisheng’s earlier efforts at mechanization. Although Miao blamed Gejiu Tin’s failed mechanization on the local mine bosses’ conservatism, mine owners had once had good reasons to be skeptical of modern technology. They had, after all, adapted their tin mining, washing, and refining

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to their commercial and environmental realities, and they had also watched each grand plan for mechanization fail. If the Gejiu mine owners’ skepticism of technology was rational and warranted when they drove out Wang Kuisheng in 1914, this was less true in 1920, when Miao Yuntai came to town. From the 1870s, when consumers increasingly bought anything from petroleum products to Christmas cookies in tins, the production and consumption of tin took place within a global market centered on London and its Metal Exchange, which was formed in 1877. In 1911, the London Metal Exchange introduced a two-tiered grading system, Grade A for tin at 99.75 percent purity or above and Grade B for tin at 99 to 99.74 percent purity. Producers in Gejiu could not even refine tin to the Grade B standards, but global demand was strong enough that Cantonese and, later, Yunnanese merchants bought Gejiu tin and shipped it to Hong Kong, where it was mixed with Malay tin, producing a product between 95 and 99 percent purity. This tin was shipped to London and sold as “Chinese Tin” and still found buyers in Europe and the United States, who bought Chinese Tin at a discount but, in the process, made China the fourth largest producer of tin (after Malaya, Dutch Indonesia, and Bolivia).25 From 1913 to 1917, global demand for tin continued to increase, particularly as American consumers began to buy new products such as the Tin Lizzie (the Ford Model T), which had 1¼ pounds of tin solder in its radiator alone. In 1917, Ford Motors used up to five tons of tin per day, and the U.S. auto industry as a whole consumed approximately 3,000 tons of tin.26 As global consumption increased and as concerned governments stockpiled tin during wartime, Gejiu production peaked at over 11,000 tons in 1917. But in 1918, as the global war ended and tin stockpiles in the United States and elsewhere were released onto the market, demand plummeted. Global tin markets then entered a period of price volatility in the 1920s, and in this more competitive environment, few wanted to buy Gejiu’s substandard product. 27 It was under these conditions that a new round of efforts to mechanize Yunnan mining began. In November 1920, when Miao Yuntai took charge of Gejiu Tin, the drop in world tin prices and demand had devastated the company. Although Miao would be removed from his post within two years, it is illuminating to review some of his efforts to turn the company around. First, we must realize that in becoming manager of Gejiu Tin in 1920 and again in 1930, Miao took over a company facing “hard budget constraints,”28 meaning that the company must become profitable or, as it had in the past, risk being shut down. Neither the Yunnan provincial government nor the provincial bank was



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capable of supporting nonperforming enterprises, and Miao therefore gained experience in running a corporation that had to pay debt and create a profitable product within a competitive international marketplace. After skillfully handling the firm’s debt, Miao turned to the long-term challenge of making Gejiu profitable, which required adopting technology in ways that made Yunnan tin salable on world markets.29 Under pressure from hard budget constraints, Miao approached technology in a pragmatic way; he was certainly not in the thrall of modern technology as some critics have assumed. He set up a modern laboratory to test tin concentrate samples, hiring industrial school graduates to build a cadre of local technical talent. And at the same time, he encouraged company workers to continue using traditional production methods as a means to keep up morale; he did not wish to reject the local expertise of tin concentrators in particular. By going into the mines often and drinking with company workers after their shifts, Miao later claimed that he learned a great deal in his short time with the company. It opened his eyes to how local methods could be effective, and it made him appreciate the accomplishments of generations of Chinese miners and mine technicians. Miao learned from observation that locals could often assess the quality of ore samples by placing them in a pan, rinsing them with water, and then appraising the quality of the ore. Their evaluations rarely diverged far from the laboratory’s findings.30 Yet these skilled local technicians could not improve the purity of Gejiu tin, and without such an improvement, Gejiu’s Chinese Tin was a third-rate product that, when it could find a market, required further refining in Hong Kong before shipping to Europe. To address this, Miao hired two American mining experts, Marshall D. Draper and H. Foster Bain, to restart mechanized production and scientifically survey local tin deposits. Marshall Draper became the company’s chief engineer and was instrumental in resiting the aerial cableway, which, by Draper’s calculations, reduced the cost of transportation from the rich Malage mines to the refinery to one U.S. cent per ton-mile. Pack trains had cost twenty-five U.S. cents per ton-mile.31 Miao remembers the transportation costs as being slashed to 10 percent the original price. Either way, it was an important use of technology, though it did not transform either the mining or smelting. It did, however, reveal to local mine owners how revolutionary the new technologies might be. Miao recalls that one owner reluctantly partnered with the Tin Company’s new cableway project. At the same time, the owner wagered that he’d dig out his eyeballs if the contraption worked. He was therefore surprised when it did work, but never carried out his promise.32

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Marshall Draper, however, was unable to duplicate this cableway success in either mining or concentrating, failures that Miao blamed on Draper’s lack of experience with tin. Miao remembered Draper as specializing in lead and zinc, which left him unequipped to develop new procedures for refining Yunnan tin to global standards. Bain’s geological surveys, however, were of great importance over the long run, but Miao would have to look elsewhere for help with the concentrating and refining plants.33 Miao Yuntai would eventually look elsewhere for help, but it would take a decade rather than a few months. Just as he was taking charge of the Tin Company in 1920, the Yunnan Army was defeated in Sichuan, and the troops under commander Gu Pinzhen retreated, heading for Kunming, determined to claim their back pay. Their commander wanted even more: control of the province. In the face of this challenge, Yunnan’s military leader Tang Jiyao removed 500,000 dollars from the provincial bank and fled Kunming by train. He was protected by his private guard led by Long Yun. With this civil war between Yunnan Army factions, the government collapsed.34 The anarchy spread to Mengzi, the major railhead near the Gejiu mining region. As Gu Pinzhen sought to rule Yunnan, large bandit organizations formed, and the train was robbed several times in 1921. In 1922, Tang Jiyao eventually rallied Yunnanese soldiers in Guangdong and marched back to Yunnan; Gu was killed in action, and Tang took over again, but the provincial government never fully recovered. Tang was forced to acquiesce to a significant devolution of power that would allow his commanders, including Long Yun, to gain authority. As part of the devolution of power, Tang allowed a key supporter to take charge of the Tin Company. Miao was relieved of his duties and left Gejiu.35 Miao went to Hong Kong first and then to Shanghai, where his mother, second brother, and sister all lived. The brother, Miao Jiashou, had been a Tang Jiyao man, and when Tang fled Yunnan in 1920, Jiashou had followed and not returned.36 When Miao Yuntai reached Shanghai in 1922, therefore, he had family support, including his brother’s access to patronage networks. The doyen of Yunnan revolutionaries, Li Genyuan, provided a temporary sinecure, as Miao himself described it, in Beijing at the national Ministry of Agriculture and Commerce. For Miao, this provided a brief chance to make important contacts before he resigned his post and heeded his mother’s instructions to get married. The wedding took place in Hong Kong at a Canadian-Chinese friend’s house and was presided over by a minister, reflecting Miao’s earlier conversion to Christianity.



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After the wedding, the couple was treated by a banker friend to a cruise back to Shanghai on the Empress of Australia, a Canadian Pacific Steamships liner taken from the Hamburg American Line as reparation after World War I. Miao believed it to be the newest and largest steamer in the world.37 Back in Shanghai, Miao was given his pick of jobs—to manage an office for the Ministry of Agriculture and Commerce or work for the Hanyeping coal mines—but soon had to give up working when his mother died. Miao headed back to Kunming with his mother’s coffin and, while in Kunming, received another job offer, this time in the provincial bank’s Shanghai branch. By summer 1924, then, Miao was back in Shanghai and working in the financial world, where he rubbed shoulders with the Bank of China’s chairman, Qian Xinzhi, as well as with the innovative and influential bankers K. P. Chen (Chen Guangfu), Chang Chia-ngau (Zhang Jia’ao), and T. V. Soong (Song Ziwen). It is also very likely that Miao made the acquaintance of the Guos (Kwoks), a successful industrial family. Miao nurtured these contacts over a four-year period, and these connections, along with his experience in banking, would prove helpful.38 –•– When Miao Yuntai returned to Kunming with his brother’s coffin in 1928, he found a provincial government in transition. Not only was Long Yun consolidating power, but there was a longer-term struggle unfolding too. Since the late Qing, there had been a nationwide search for new approaches to governance—a broad and sometimes fraught set of experiments to create a modern China with modern citizens.39 At the provincial level, the experiments produced frequent changes in the institutions of governance, though these changes were rooted in the original goals of the New Government era (1901–1911) when Yunnanese were first subjected to plans for systematically developing the province’s material and human resources. The latest set of experiments began in 1927, just before Miao moved home. These major changes were driven by both internal developments within Yunnan and the new Nationalist government’s Laws for the Organization of Provincial Governance (Sheng zhengfu zuzhi fa).40 As required by central government law, Yunnan created basic institutions of administration, education, finance, and economic construction.41 Because of the nature of internal war within the province, however, the Long Yun administration pursued state building with particular energy, evident in the efforts to gain control over revenue and spending. These developments were important because, as the provincial government reformed its fiscal capabilities, it could

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begin spending on nonmilitary projects such as economic construction, which started to transform people’s lives. And no one would have more influence on Yunnan’s economic construction than Miao Yuntai, who, as head of the new Department for Agriculture and Mining, was responsible for developing agriculture, commerce, mining, and industry.42 Miao brought to his new post a set of ideas influenced in part by his experiences as a Yunnanese in New York and Shanghai. In New York, he had been exposed to the tumultuous changes after World War I. When he arrived in New York, American entrepreneurs were still engaged in mergers, acquisitions, and investments that were building industrial giants run by a new managerial elite. Earlier waves of mergers, sparked by New Jersey’s legalization of holding companies, had already produced firms with centralized administration. Thus, Miao saw large, integrated firms that in the wake of the creation of the Federal Trade Commission (1914) faced market competition, and these firms were, in the postwar recession, increasingly reliant on capital from investment banks.43 For Miao, the lesson was that finance and industry were linked—and that even firms that were dominant in their industries had to operate on sound business principles that provided ownership with oversight while also allowing professional managers the autonomy to run efficient, profitable businesses. Miao would transfer these lessons from the world of private capital in the United States to that of state-led development in Yunnan.44 Miao’s ideas were therefore derivative and creative at the same time, and they might be best understood by turning to the concept of corporate governance, which can be defined as the set of institutions that synchronize the interests of management and ownership by clearly delineating responsibilities among the two groups. In private joint-stock corporations and in China’s state enterprises after the 1994 Company Law, the goal of corporate governance is to incentivize managers to efficiently grow a company’s value for shareholders, even if the shareholders are state institutions. This often means that owners exercise the power of oversight through an annual meeting at which they elect a board of directors who then hire and oversee management. Management, in turn, is given the power to make key decisions, including the hiring and firing of junior managers and labor, in order to create profit and value for ownership. In this model of corporate governance, the common goal of profitability is expected to lead to efficient use of resources and a net inflow of cash. It is a model often contrasted with the state-owned enterprises (SOEs) of a centrally planned economy such as China’s from about 1956 to



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1979. In such a system, the SOEs lacked coherent ownership and were subject to multiple planning bodies that made hiring, production, distribution, and pricing decisions. Efficiency and profit were not priorities because financing and product “markets” were guaranteed. Debt and inefficiency were simply not the responsibility of managers: their salaries were paid whether or not the enterprise was efficient.45 When Miao Yuntai took control of Gejiu Tin in 1920, he faced hard budget constraints and was responsible for transforming the corporation into a profitable enterprise that could manage its debt. When he returned to the company in 1930, moreover, he would encounter activist shareholders who insisted that proper corporate governance principles be followed. At Gejiu Tin and in later projects, Miao tried to create corporations that were autonomous from the state bureaucracy, efficient, and profitable—goals that were at odds with the dominant model of development that emerged in Nationalist China (1928–1949). Following the precedents set in the late Qing, the Nationalist government continued to organize its state enterprises as bureaucratic institutions, a practice that built on the deep reservoir of Chinese administrative tradition. Instead of being organized as autonomous corporations designed to produce value under the conditions of hard budget restraints, the enterprises were primarily designed to preserve and increase the power of the state, meaning that efficiency and profit were secondary considerations.46 While Miao was also interested in state power, his approach to economic development resulted in significantly different corporate institutions. Miao Yuntai brought his ideas first to the Quanye (Industrial) Bank and Gejiu Tin (Gejiu xiwu gongsi), thus testing his approaches in the financial and mining sectors before going on to create new institutions, including the Yunnan Tin Refining Company (Yunnan lianxi gongsi), the Fudian New Bank (Fudian xinyinhang), and the Yunnan Economic Commission (Yunnan jingji weiyuanhui). As he gained influence, Miao designed the Economic Commission (YEC) to manage state shares in state-owned and joint state-private corporations, as well as to coordinate development in agriculture, energy, textiles, and mining. In other words, he worked to turn the Yunnan provincial government into a developmental state by creating something resembling a state holding company linked to the new provincial bank. This level of ambition suggests that we must see Miao not simply as a provincial modernizer whose efforts to develop industry represented, in Hall’s words, a “quick, opportunistic attempt to make money to keep the government going.”47 Miao had a more radical vision.

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As Miao took his second shot at rebuilding Yunnan’s tin industry, he did so within a specific international context. Although tin producers had enjoyed rising prices and productivity in 1926 and 1927, the late 1920s told a different story. From 1929 to 1930, international tin prices were cut in half even as production facilities were on the increase. By the early 1930s, tin supplies outstripped demand, and accumulated stocks glutted the market. To deal with the precipitous fall in prices, the major producers and their governments formed a cartel, the International Tin Committee (ITC). By bringing British producers in the United Kingdom, Nigeria, and Malaya into alliance with the Bolivians and the Dutch, the ITC sought to create a stable international future for the industry.48 Thus, just as Miao was gaining power in Yunnan, an international cartel was successfully curbing global production and forcing prices to rebound, goals achieved by 1933.49 It was an ideal time to reconsider Gejiu Tin’s approach. As he reentered the world of mining, Miao faced two important challenges. The first was to respond to activist private shareholders who wanted the company’s corporate governance sorted out, and the second was to turn Gejiu Tin into a profitable company for both the private shareholders and the Yunnan provincial government. In response to the first challenge, Miao and Geijiu Tin’s board of directors brought the company back into compliance with Company Law. For the first time since 1913, they updated the shareholder rolls and called a shareholders’ meeting. It proved difficult, however, to contact many of the corporation’s shareholders. Over the years, some private shares had been sold without the company’s knowledge, and the government institutions that had once managed state shares had been renamed or eradicated, making it unclear as to what departments would exercise state ownership responsibilities. During fall 1930, however, Miao and the board sorted out the ownership structure. They then held the shareholders’ meeting, overseeing the election of a new five-man board in which two members represented private shareholders and three—including Miao himself—represented the state’s shares. The board then appointed Miao as the general manager (zongli).50 As Miao began his tenure, he was managing a corporation with a newly clarified corporate governance system in which he, as general manager, was responsible for the company’s performance. He could hire and fire most employees, and he could, in consultation with the board, set the salaries for the engineers and management (zhiyuan). The board thus gave the general manager broad powers to run the company as he saw fit, while it acted in the interests of the private and state shareholders by retaining oversight, including the



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ability to set the general manager’s salary. In seeking efficiency and profit, it also incentivized managers and engineers to improve performance through the mechanism of profit sharing.51 From company accounting records for 1933, we know that Gejiu Tin quickly became profitable, earning a net profit of 5 million yuan, from which it paid bonuses to its managers.52 In response to the second challenge, Miao sought to adapt new technology to the realities of Yunnan in order to refine tin to world standards and sell it on the London Metal Exchange. As he would later note, economic development requires adaptation to the situation one finds; one cannot always import existing technologies without adjustments.53 This was hard-won wisdom. In the two years Miao had run Gejiu Tin in the early 1920s, he had hired American engineers to improve Gejiu refining technology, but they had failed. One of Miao’s later replacements as general manager rehired the American Marshall Draper in 1926 in another effort to mechanize not just concentrating and smelting but also deep pit mining. Draper installed “two 25-h.p. Babcock and Wilcox boilers with economizers and induced draft, and a 300-k.w. generator coupled direct to a Uniflow engine and equipped with condenser and feed water heater . . . [to] furnish power for mill and smelter, and a transmission line 2.5 miles long to Malage.”54 Under Draper’s watch, Yunnan coal mines were tapped to provide fuel for the boilers, and roads were constructed in and around Gejiu in order to use Ford tractors for hauling. The entire system proved unsustainable. Thus, Miao knew that Yunnan mining enterprises had first tried Japanese engineers in the Qing period, then Germans in the 1910s, and finally Americans in the 1920s, and he concluded that the problem was not mining engineering and technology itself but the selection of mining technology that fit the situation. In other words, Yunnan needed not just any mining engineer, but a specialist with experience in solving tin smelting problems at an affordable cost. Thus, rather than hire another American, Miao turned to the British, knowing that they possessed experience with tin mining in Southeast Asia. Miao was also banking on the British desire to undermine French control over the financing of Yunnan tin mining and transport, which would make them willing to share technology and provide access to the London Metal Exchange.55 To put his plan into action, Miao traveled to Singapore, Penang, and Hong Kong to research shipping and wholesaling, and he contacted the British consulate.56 The British were willing to supply the technology, but Yunnan had to pay the way for a mining engineer, which Miao did with profits from the Quanye Bank. Thus, in 1932, yet another foreign mining engineer, S. B. Archdeacon, arrived in

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Gejiu. Archdeacon had held the position of general works manager at the Straits Trading Company (STC) from 1902 to 1922. When he began at STC, the British colonial government had just finished reordering the tin industry to favor mechanical production, and the STC and its modern smelting works had been granted monopolies on access to ore, helping to tip the competitive balance in their favor and away from Chinese producers in Malaya.57 In his capacity as general works manager, Archdeacon had been responsible for smelting, and from 1908 to 1915, he had supervised the reconstruction of the company’s smelters at Pulau Brani and Penang while also leading the first of several efforts to prevent the loss of large amounts of tin dust that floated up the chimneys.58 With this background, Archdeacon had experience in solving technical problems, and after he had begun his investigation of Gejiu, his report was greatly anticipated. Within a few months, Archdeacon made his report: for a third time, the Tin Company would need to retool, but internationally acceptable tin purity was economically feasible.59 As he began his work, moreover, he focused on the process of refining, not on mining. Following Miao’s beliefs that state-run enterprises must seek profit, there would be no major investment in mining machinery, only in concentrating and smelting because they promised profitable returns. Gejiu Tin and private mining companies would still conduct mining by using low-technology methods. But concentrating and smelting was another matter, and Archdeacon, under Miao’s watchful eye, experimented with ways to reorganize the process. By March 1933, the final trials were run—causing Miao to lose sleep—but the result was a cheaper and more successful refining process.60 The separation of mechanized tin refining from traditional mining was institutionalized when Miao created a new corporation, the Yunnan Tin Refining Company— YTC as it would become known on the London Metal Exchange. Public and private money was invested with the expectations of profits.61 While Archdeacon began implementing a plan to refine tin to acceptable levels of purity, Miao researched the logistics of selling and shipping to London. In Singapore, Penang, and Hong Kong, he toured tin refineries and laboratories, seeking to understand how his corporation could verify the purity of its product while also collecting vital information on pricing. The LME wanted Yunnan tin to be shipped via Hong Kong, where purity could be verified by lab tests. To avoid this extra cost, Miao had to demonstrate that YTC’s lab was reliable. A second problem was pricing. The LME set tin prices daily via telegraph, and sellers had twenty-four hours to confirm if they would meet the posted price. How could Gejiu, which lacked a telegraph connection to London,



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conquer distance and time in order to collect the information necessary to put Yunnan tin in a competitive position? Miao negotiated permission to have the LME prices relayed via wireless from Hong Kong. After the LME price reports came in the middle of the night, the Tin Refinery investigated the exchange rates for the English pound sterling to the Hong Kong dollar and the Hong Kong dollar to the Yunnanese dollar. The problem of currency exchange was particularly acute because of volatility, and if YTC did not predict exchange rates properly, it could suffer huge losses. So each day Gejiu was in wireless contact with three Hong Kong banks, inquiring about the currency prices in the morning and afternoon. Armed with this information, they would then decide on whether to sell their tin (and their currencies). By April 1933, these challenges had been worked out, and YTC was shipping tin directly to London, New York, and other destinations.62 Of Gejiu’s tin produced each year, the refinery began in 1933 and 1934 to turn out first 9 percent, then 10 percent, and, finally, by 1936, about 17 to 18 percent of the total Gejiu production. It never reached the maximum of 2,000 tons refined per year, but it came close, reaching 1,794 in 1936 and 1,774 in the difficult year of 1937.63 By 1933, Gejiu Tin’s new general manager successfully reorganized the company and mechanized parts of tin production while leaving mining untouched. This suggests that rather than thinking of mechanization as an undifferentiated whole, we think of it as a set of interrelated but still discrete organizational and mechanical processes that in some circumstances can be disarticulated and implemented in different combinations. Modern industrial production is not necessarily fully present or absolutely absent; sometimes its organizational and technical practices might be combined with older methods. The story of tin in Gejiu therefore is not about wholesale technological transformation. Instead, it is about piecemeal institutional and technological changes that, when combined with emerging corporate organization, produced something new that was still anchored in the old. The dream of mechanizing Yunnan mining had been introduced in 1876, but not realized until the 1930s, when Miao brought this dream to life by conceiving of Yunnan as a unique case. –•– In 1932, as he oversaw the creation of the Tin Refinery, Miao also helped create the provincial Fudian New Bank, thus strengthening the financial industry in Yunnan. Fudian New Bank was developed in reaction to fiscal and economic crises—runaway inflation and a depreciating currency. As an institution, the

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bank was technically a product of group planning; after all, a preparatory committee created its institutional framework, and Miao Yuntai was only one of the committee’s members. When the bank opened, moreover, it was Li Peiyan who became the director. At least one insider, however, has identified Miao as the mastermind behind the bank, and it is said that he wrote out the bank’s charter while overseeing the construction of the new tin refinery in Gejiu.64 The new bank opened in July 1932, and in October, it issued a new currency, the new Yunnan dollar (xin dianbi) while beginning to buy back the inflationary old Yunnan dollar. To support the new dollar, moreover, the Long Yun government had revamped the tax system, requiring all taxes to be paid in silver—or, if using old Yunnan dollars, to be paid at the high rate of five times the listed amount. This policy was designed to acquire silver holdings to support the convertibility of the new Yunnan dollar.65 However, the strength of the new currency became tied to opium exports. Opium exports earned both silver and foreign currencies, which were used to defend the price of the new Yunnan dollar. So while the Fudian New Bank took a number of steps to ensure trust in its new currency, the underlying economics of opium export were the real bulwark.66 The bank’s reliance on opium exports was risky. In 1933, prices became increasingly volatile because of oversupply, as well as the central government’s robust efforts to gain control over the industry.67 To help reduce the bank’s reliance on opium, the provincial government issued regulations that were to provide the Fudian New Bank with greater access to foreign currency and silver earned through exports.68 This was to include currencies earned from tin exports, which were to be sold to the Fudian New Bank branch in Gejiu. In response, tin merchants petitioned the government to rescind the regulations, and Kunming transferred responsibility for working out a solution to the bank itself—something its director, Li Peiyan, was unable to do; the regulations were dropped in November. Significantly, Miao Yuntai did not at this time support the regulations, and his decision ensured that the bank would continue to rely on opium exports.69 By late 1933, opium prices in Hankou, a major market for Yunnanese opium, began to fall. As the crisis worsened, the opium trading companies had a hard time repaying loans, and the Fudian New Bank suddenly was cut off from supplies of silver and foreign reserves. As reserves dwindled, it could no longer make good on exchange drafts in its Hong Kong and Shanghai branches. In other words, those who deposited new Yunnan dollars in Kunming could not withdraw Shanghai or Hong Kong currency elsewhere.70 The new currency



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was in trouble as the silver that had once backed it began to dwindle. After a last-ditch effort in late 1934 to create new opium export routes by air to Indochina and Shanghai, the decision was made to abandon opium exports.71 This decision was combined with a move to replace Li Peiyan with Miao Yuntai as director of Fudian New Bank. As the general manager of the Tin Refinery and new director of the bank, Miao now reversed course and encouraged the refinery and other tin firms to request their documentary bills from the Fudian New Bank. In return, the firms were offered advance loans but also were required to sell any repatriated foreign currency at market prices to the bank.72 What explains this reversal? The earlier regulations would have jeopardized the autonomy of Gejiu Tin by mandating currency sales to the bank. With Miao as the bank director, however, currency sales were now voluntary and priced by the market. In other words, Miao had sought to keep Gejiu Tin from falling under bureaucratic control when Li Peiyuan was in charge, but once Miao took over, he was able to do what Li Peiyuan could not: convince the Tin Refinery and private firms to implement a voluntary version of the plan rejected in 1933.73 By giving the bank access to foreign currency earned by tin exports, moreover, he strengthened the bank’s ability to defend the new Yunnan dollar while simultaneously helping it to displace the Paris-based Banque de l’Indochine as the most powerful financial institution in Southwest China.74 By the mid-1930s, then, Yunnan Province was in a remarkable position with a stable currency and a strong bank. As trust in the bank grew, customer deposits increased from 3 million new Yunnan dollars in 1933 to 48 million in 1935. At the same time, the bank increased its foreign reserves, including both Hong Kong dollars and English pounds sterling. This allowed Miao and the provincial leadership to make another radical decision: taking Yunnan off the silver standard. For Yunnan’s currency, as for China’s, the use of the silver standard left the currency vulnerable to fluctuations in global silver prices, so the government had little control over relative commodity price fluctuations within Yunnan as well as the relative value of Yunnanese exports.75 In the leadup to and aftermath of the U.S. Silver Purchase Act (1934), the price of silver rose, and despite legislation to prevent it, silver coins (bankai) flowed out of Yunnan at the same time that the price of Yunnanese exports increased. Although the provincial government was ultimately able to stem the export of silver, this era witnessed a discussion about stabilizing the paper currency by pegging it to another currency rather than backing it with silver.76

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Miao and his colleagues ultimately decided to peg the new Yunnan dollar to the English pound sterling (at twenty Yunnan dollars to the pound). Since Gejiu Tin was shipping to the London Metal Exchange, there was a steady influx of British pounds. If the new Yunnan dollar became stronger against the pound, then exports could be slowed, thus controlling the currency relationship (and vice versa if the new Yunnan dollar lost purchasing power). Thus, in early 1935, before the central government acted, Yunnan was already preparing to leave the silver standard. One result was a strong fiscal and monetary policy that saw the Fudian New Bank’s foreign reserves grow steadily through 1939.77 –•– In the years before the outbreak of total war with Japan, a small cadre of Yunnanese sought to transform the economic future of the province. Under Miao Yuntai’s leadership, the province began to produce tin at a quality that could be sold on any market in the world. Tin was the key: it allowed the Yunnan government to stabilize its currency and move away from opium, which was increasingly under central government control. It also provided a platform for Miao Yuntai to argue for a larger set of transformative changes. Those changes were to be implemented through the Yunnan Economic Commission (YEC), which was established in December 1934 with Miao as the chair. The YEC has long been controversial. Some have seen it as a manifestation of the Miao clique’s effort to gain control over Yunnan’s industry and capital.78 Others have seen it as representative of Miao’s narrowly conceived approach to developing a backward economy that was losing one of its mainstays—opium.79 Neither of these interpretations, however, comes close to capturing the audacity of Miao’s vision. In fact, rather than clarify this transformative time, they caricature it. In March 1934, as he proposed the YEC, Miao laid out a logic based on a broad vision of global and local developments.80 Looking around the Depressionravaged world, he noted that every nation shared the same sickness: economic decline. To reverse decline, many nations had turned to economic planning.81 In a nation such as China, Miao argued, the challenges were greater because of underdeveloped production capacities, poor transportation, and weak economic organization. To address these challenges, the state would have to step in and “accept responsibility for showing the people the way.”82 To do so, Miao believed, would require organizing an economic commission designed to accelerate economic construction, improve living standards, and defend against



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economic decline. For Miao, the vision of development was broad and extended to the realms of finance, industry, agriculture, public health, and education.83 Miao was not an opponent of private corporations. He believed that private Chinese enterprise was particularly suited to coastal regions because of convenient access to capital and transport. In border areas like Yunnan, however, Miao argued that the government must shoulder the burden of leading the people (wei renmin qiandao) because private enterprise was unable to undertake large-scale, long-term investments.84 Thus, the vision behind the YEC was that of a planning and management body, designed to lead Yunnan’s industrialization and oversee government ownership stakes in state-run and joint private-state corporations.85 Like the centralized holding companies of large American corporations, the YEC was designed to coordinate and concentrate limited human capital, financial resources, and technology in order to successfully pursue economic development.86 At the same time, Miao was aware that the Chinese government had been involved in industrial construction since the self-strengthening period in the 1860s, and from his point of view, the outcomes had never been satisfactory. The problem, he argued, was that bureaucrats were unqualified to run the companies. Thus, he envisioned the YEC as a new type of entity that could plan for the long term, attract and reward private capital, and select experts, like the professional managers of American corporations, to run its own enterprises. As part of its program, the YEC sought to build a variety of companies and hire managers who would be responsible to the YEC and other shareholders but also autonomous in their abilities to run their corporations. As Miao himself noted, it made no sense to concentrate management power in the YEC itself because it would have to hire people with abilities similar to those of the company managers, thus duplicating expertise and creating an inefficient organization.87 In the language of the late 1930s, the YEC and its corporations were designed to be enterprise organizations (qiye jiguan), not to be administrative organs (xingzheng jiguan). The corporations developed by the YEC were usually registered according to Company Law, just like private enterprise, meaning that they were subject to corporate governance systems that emphasized performance and accountability.88 Miao’s fascinating vision was not without contradictions. He wanted to combine the performance of professionally run private firms with the power of long-term planning, coordination, and access to capital. He was, Shi Yun argues, constructing the YEC as a strange beast—an investment company and a state-run consulting service is how she describes it. The YEC was to be of

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the government but not entirely by the government, with the bureaucrats in the Department of Revenue and Department of Economic Construction excluded from exercising control over the YEC and its firms.89 Much like the State-owned Assets Supervision and Administration Commission (SASAC) formed in 2003,90 the YEC was initially intended to take responsibility for managing all government shares held in state-run and joint state-private firms, including the shares administered by other departments, but this effort provoked turf battles and failed. Nevertheless, the YEC did create a series of successful new corporations, thus gaining an ownership stake in the most dynamic of provincial companies.91 Despite the successes, the YEC was still an institution of contradictions. It was designed to be apolitical in that, as chair, Miao himself never joined a political party and sought to present himself as a disinterested technocrat. He considered that his lack of political commitment would help the economic autonomy and performance of the corporations.92 At the same time, however, he never clarified how the YEC’s push for profit could be rectified with the larger purpose of contributing toward Yunnan’s economic construction. Nor did he explain how the emphasis on hiring experts to run the corporations would insulate those firms from the YEC itself, which was, in the end, an arm of the government.93 And, finally, he never articulated his own relationship to a process in which, as director of the provincial bank, member of multiple boards of directors, and, in some cases, general manager of corporations, he had a stupendous number of conflicts of interest. Nevertheless, by late December 1934, the YEC was up and running. It had funding from a number of sources. The provincial treasury provided 600,000 yuan as start-up capital for three factories: textiles, metals, and cement. The Department of Revenue contributed 72,000 yuan for the metals factory and engineering projects. And beginning in 1934, the provincial government allocated over 2.898 million Chinese yuan from the salt tax revenue.94 As its corporations grew, the YEC would no longer look to the government revenue for working capital. Instead, it relied on the Fudian New Bank, investors, and retained earnings. The growth of assets under the YEC was rapid, from approximately 3.57 million yuan in 1934–1935 to 211.45 million in fixed assets and as much as 140.36 million in working capital just four years later.95 In other words, the YEC’s ability to start new firms and grow Yunnan’s industrial base was impressive. This was the reflection of visions for urban and rural change as the YEC sought to develop new industries around the province. Those new



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industries took on a variety of forms, including corporations completely owned by the YEC and Fudian New Bank, partnerships in which the YEC solicited investment from other government institutions, partnerships with private investors, and locally managed enterprises such as cooperatives (hezuo she). One of the first projects was the creation of a modern cotton textile industry, which was selected for two primary reasons. The first was import substitution: Yunnan spent more on imported yarns and cloth (according to government estimates, over 15 million dollars) than any other commodity. The second was crop substitution: farmers needed to replace opium, which had provided a significant amount of rural income.96 While the YEC sought to build the textile factories, it originally envisioned the textile factories to be linked to the creation of a cement factory and a power plant. Initially there was not enough capital for all of these projects, and the plans evolved. The cement plant was put on hold, the power plant was scaled down to 1,250 kilowatts, and the textile mill was designed for only 5,000 spindles and 60 power looms, quite small when compared to the Shanghai mills with tens of thousands of spindles or, just a few years later, Kunming’s Yu Dian spinning works, which would have 25,000 spindles. To initiate the project, the YEC registered the Yunnan Textile Stock Company (Yunnan fangzhichang gufen youxian gongsi) with the national government. Initial capitalization was to be 1.2 million Chinese yuan, with the YEC investing the lion’s share (889,000 yuan); the Fudian New Bank also provided 12.6 million in loans as working capital.97 While the official reports mention only these two sources of financing, both Miao Yuntai and Yang Kecheng remember that the Guo (Kwok) family’s Yong’an Company also invested up to 200,000 yuan in Yunnan Textile, only to be bought out once the factory became profitable.98 The Guos’ involvement in Yunnan’s industrial transformation began when Miao traveled to Shanghai, where he studied the organization and technology of foreign and Chinese firms. During that trip, Miao came to lean heavily on the Guo family, whom he may have known from his time in Shanghai. For detailed advice, Miao turned to one of the second-generation Guos, Guo Dihua, who had graduated from the New Bedford Textile School in Massachusetts with a degree in general cotton manufacturing. After returning to Shanghai, Dihua worked his way up to manage the Yong’an Textile Manufacturing Company on Nanjing Road.99 He advised Miao on machinery, plant layout, worker training, and purchasing. Miao then spent £11,000 on a steam-powered electric generator and two boilers as well

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as US$96,800 for 5,200 American-made (Saco Lowell) roving and spinning machines and £3,100 for 60 power looms from Butterworth and Dickinson in Lancashire. The beginning of textile mechanization in Yunnan therefore depended on the knowledge built up by the Chinese Australian entrepreneur Kwok Luo (Guo Le) and his American-educated nephew, Dihua. The Yunnan Textile Factories, the first mechanized light industry in Yunnan, were built in 1936 on 85 mu of land that the company purchased to the south of Kunming, near the Pavilion to the Jade Emperor. Under the direction of engineer Zhu Jianfei (who was introduced to Miao by Guo Dihua), the buildings were constructed, the workers trained, and the machinery installed in time to open in the inauspicious summer of 1937. The training of workers took some time, and the initial class of trainees, all women, numbered some 60 people.100 Eventually the number of workers in the two factories reached 474 (plus an additional 42 professional staff): 81 men and 393 women. Most were young, on average only nineteen years old, and they lived in company dorms, where they were, in keeping with the ideas of the times, provided with an exercise yard. Wages for men ranged from 0.07 to 0.84 yuan; women received wages from 0.079 yuan to 0.808 yuan.101 To earn their wages, the laborers worked one of three daily eight-hour shifts. The spinning mill was configured to produce a range of yarns, which reflected Miao’s belief in adapting to local circumstances: the mill turned out rough yarns that local handicraft weavers could use and finer yarns that could be woven by the power looms into cloth priced competitively with imports.102 By 1937, Miao and the Yunnanese government were making progress in building industry literally from the ground up, beginning with extracting the wealth stored under the soil and then addressing textiles, power, and, of course, finance. With projects on multiple fronts, the work was slow, and the cost in terms of poor working conditions and mortality among labor—particularly the miners—was shockingly high.103 The effort to provide crop substitutes for rural Yunnanese gained momentum by 1937, when, with the help of the central government’s Ministry of Finance, the Yunnan Provincial Government created a Cotton Office (Mianye chu) to manage the increasing number of acres across the province that were devoted to testing and growing various strains of cotton. Cotton acreage was nearly doubled from 26,000 mu in 1937 to almost 52,000 in 1938.104 The spread of government-supported cotton growing helped bring the state into rural lives,



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including the lives of borderlands indigenes, although there was a distinct unevenness to the process. In ethnically diverse Kaiyuan County, for example, the YEC tested the use of kapok for making yarn and, despite inconsistencies in staple length, kapok was found to produce a decent yarn. From 1937, the Cotton Office experimented with planting kapok, and once the war broke out, the YEC, along with the Bank of China, Communications Bank, China Agricultural Bank, and Fudian New Bank, created a program for loans that would promote the expansion of kapok planting. With the loan program in place by 1940, Kaiyuan County farmers planted 150,000 kapok trees, although the ability to convince farmers to take loans and invest in planting kapok depended on whether they owned their own land. Tenant contracts were three years in length, and kapok trees did not produce until the third year, so tenant farmers rarely participated in the program. If the program’s appeal was limited by socioeconomics, it was also limited by geography and ethnicity. Loan officers were nervous about straying far from the county capital and into the “deep mountains and thick forests,” where Kaiyuan’s non-Han communities were located.105 It therefore seems likely that landowning Han farmers were the primary participants in the efforts to replace opium with cotton and kapok, with a few, somewhat surprising exceptions. In western Yunnan’s Tai regions, the Cotton Office enjoyed some success. A 1938 survey by the central government’s Relief Commission revealed that the Cotton Office program had already planted 10,000 kapok trees in Mangshi, one of the Tai saopha territories where there were also plans to plant Brazilian and American strains of cotton.106 This was an admittedly small beachhead in a borderlands region that was perceived to be troublesome and would soon receive a tremendous amount of government and media attention. Nevertheless, it reveals how active were Miao’s YEC and its related institutions in seeking to develop the province’s mineral, agricultural, and industrial sectors. –•– After Miao Yuntai returned to Yunnan in 1928, he built key administrative, financial, and industrial institutions, seeking to use them to develop his home province. Following Shi Yun’s advice as well as the approaches by recent scholarship on the history of capitalism, corporate organization, and state building, I’ve placed Miao’s work into a contingent narrative, paying careful attention to long-term historical contexts while also acknowledging how Miao’s plans

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were not simply derivative or predictable, but original because they were based on his reactions to the convergence of multiple historical trajectories (see the introduction to chapter 5). As Patrick Joyce and Judd Kinzley have noted, the institutions of the state— and, in particular, approaches to economic development—are best understood using the concepts of assemblage or layers (see the introduction to chapter 5). To enrich Yunnan, Miao turned to the mechanization of mining, a dream initiated in 1876 and passed down to later generations. He focused on Gejiu’s tin deposits, the target of state development efforts since the late Qing, and he sought to adapt and build on Gejiu Tin, a company incorporated in 1905 as Gejiu Mining and then restructured in 1909. Miao was thus the heir to institutions and ideas from Yunnan’s past. He had inherited a shared belief in the transformative power of mining, and this belief had undergirded the program that sent him to the United States to study at the University of Minnesota’s School of Mines. He had also inherited a vision of his home province as backward, isolated, ethnically diverse, and therefore vulnerable, and this vision, along with his experiences in the United States, had shaped his understanding of how to build state-run corporations that could lift Yunnan from poverty. Miao Yuntai was an important figure not just because he successfully brought limited mechanized mining and a small textile mill to Yunnan Province; he is important for the ways in which he accomplished these tasks—and for the institutions he created that would contribute to the assemblage of the Yunnan provincial state for decades to come. Miao created a set of rationalizations for placing the economy of the borderlands in state hands, arguing that Yunnan was different from the interior provinces and that private enterprise was insufficient for development. The logic was that Yunnan’s remote, underdeveloped status required state intervention and oversight. However, Miao’s approach to managing corporations and building the YEC also emphasized corporate governance standards of managerial autonomy, responsiveness to shareholders, and the creation of competitive products through efficiency. When we compare the Yunnan case to the national case, we see areas of similarity and difference. The best-studied and most important case of Nationalist government–led industrialization is the NRC and its enterprises. The NRC was created in the shadow of the 1932 Japanese invasion of the Northeast, when Chiang Kai-shek was persuaded to form the National Defense Planning Commission. In 1935, the commission was reorganized and renamed the National Resources Commission. Over the next decade, it would grow from a group of



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31 individuals into an economic force that managed 130 enterprises and employed almost 300,000 people.107 While the achievements of the NRC have been studied for decades, it has been overlooked that Yunnan, an alleged backward border province, developed its own corporations and that it did so on a time line that was ahead of the national government’s NRC. In 1935, the NRC was envisioned as little more than a strategic planning body. It did not acquire the power to build and manage enterprises until 1936. In contrast, Miao Yuntai’s YEC was established in 1934, and its initial responsibilities included both strategic planning, like the NRC, and the construction and oversight of state enterprises and state investments in joint ventures with private shareholders. In 1934, almost two years before the NRC, the YEC initiated its first major development project: an extraordinary effort to replace imported yarns and textiles with Yunnanese products spun from locally grown cotton in the Yunnan Textile Mills.108 Miao guided the process throughout 1935 and 1936, when an electric plant, power spindles and looms, and other equipment were researched, purchased, shipped, and installed. This time line put Yunnan ahead of the NRC in terms of its experience as a manager of enterprises, and it is probably for this reason that Miao was appointed consultant to the NRC in 1936, when the first national enterprises were created.109 Clearly, Miao and Yunnan were recognized leaders in economic development. While the YEC obviously predated the NRC and Miao was sought for his expertise, it is not the case that the YEC provided an exact blueprint for the NRC. The two institutions were products of different historical trajectories. Whereas the NRC and its directors such as Weng Wenhao began as economic planners and over time turned to managing enterprises, Miao’s professional career was the opposite. He started his career as the general manager of Gejiu Tin and only later moved into planning. This difference in career trajectory influenced Miao to construct his corporations and the YEC with a greater emphasis on efficient corporate governance, manager autonomy, and performance. The NRC, in contrast, provided little autonomy to its enterprises; unlike the YEC, decision making was concentrated in the NRC, including decisions about employee pay, which was dictated by a set scale that was similar to salary scales for bureaucrats.110 In the long run, it would be the NRC model that influenced the development of the state enterprises after the 1949 revolution, and Miao’s approach to more efficient, autonomous corporations would fall by the wayside, at least until the post-1979 reform era. Still, Miao Yuntai’s influence on economic change was

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substantial. By the beginning of the war in 1937, he and his colleagues were developing corporate institutions that allowed the state to begin industrializing Yunnan and reach into the countryside to influence credit, crop selection, and land use. As the war came, moreover, Miao would again beat the central government to the punch by using personal contacts and new institutional mechanisms to begin harnessing private corporations for the war effort. It is at this point that the western Yunnan trade firms, which we last encountered in Kham, return to our story. In the wartime era, they began to face state controls that for the first time, altered their approaches to business. In Miao’s Yunnan, in other words, we find the most important early efforts to theorize and then implement state-run corporations and state control over private firms. These are defining characteristics of China’s past and present, and they were pioneered in Yunnan precisely because the province had been understood since the late nineteenth century as poor, ethnically diverse, and vulnerable—and thus desperately in need of state intervention. This means, of course, that we cannot understand modern China without considering the Southwest borderlands.

7

Corporations, the State, and Ethnic Difference

. . . a bridge between the state and the peoples of the borderlands . . . —Fang Kesheng, a Tai aristocrat envisioning the future

as Miao Yuntai’s Yunnan Economic Commission (YEC) was redefining economic development in China, a young idealist named Yang Kecheng came to work for Miao. Yang was a Yunnanese native, born into Xizhou’s Yan family, although he received his father Yan Zizhen’s original, preadoption surname of Yang. Despite his surname, there was no mistaking that he was the son of one of Yunnan’s most successful entrepreneurs. Educated in Kunming and Nanjing, Yang would also attend Harvard Business School (figure 14). Raised in a household that made its fortune from transnational commerce with colonial Burma, Yang developed a deep interest in the British impact on the Yunnan borderlands. His passion led to participation in anti-imperialist demonstrations in the early 1930s, and as a young man abroad, he wrote to denounce British pressure on the Yunnan frontier before returning to his home province full of ideas for the future.1 With his elite education and knowledge of transborder issues, Yang Kecheng was an heir to the reformist traditions emanating from cosmopolitan Yunnanese merchant families. Like the men of the Heshun Chongxin Society, Yang Kecheng dreamed of rural reform, but for Yang, as for Miao Yuntai almost twenty years earlier, big dreams and the prestige of an American university education did not guarantee instant success. Yang returned to Yunnan in 1935 only to “float along like duckweed” while looking for work. Like Miao, who initially relied on his brother’s connections, Yang’s first break came through a family acquaintance. In this case, it was a provincial government figure named Zhou Zhongyue, who knew Yang’s father. Zhou patiently listened to Yang’s IN 1937,

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FIGURE 14.   Yang

Kecheng at Harvard Business School. At Harvard, Yang went by the name Ti Zen, a rendering of his alternative name, Tiren. Sou rc e : HBS Annual Report, 1933–1934. HBS Archives, Baker Library, Harvard Business School. Image courtesy of the Harvard Business School Archives. Reprinted with permission.

passionate discussions of rural relief plans, based in part on modern interpretations of eleventh-century reformer Wang Anshi’s policies, before passing the young man on to Miao Yuntai. Within days of meeting with Zhou, Kecheng found himself face-to-face with Miao, one of the most powerful men in the province, regaling him with his interpretations of Wang Anshi and dreams of saving rural China. Miao must have been impressed; he hired the young man and charged him with initiating a pilot project in several rural areas near Kunming.2 Although Yang would later denounce Miao Yuntai as a bureaucratic capitalist and a thief, he was awed by the older man, and even years later in the Mao era, Yang wrote of the exiled Miao’s tenaciously precise approach to work, which was often done late at night when poring over the accounts of various YEC enterprises. Yang also appreciated how popular Miao was with workers—how he often ate, drank, and socialized with them.3 Yang Kecheng’s official appointment was to the Fudian New Bank, which he joined in January 1937. This was the period when Miao was implementing plans for textile manufacturing and cotton cultivation, expanding the state’s reach into light industry as well as into rural Yunnan. The previous September, Miao and the bank had begun to address rural development with more care. The bank initiated the Rural Enterprise Department, focusing on irrigation, seed improvement, and the introduction of cash crops. At the same time, they established the Rural Credit Commission in order to address local needs for loans. They had found, unsurprisingly, that agricultural debt was a major problem, and the loan programs were established to provide reasonably priced capital for farmers.4



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In his work for the Fudian New Bank, Yang Kecheng would be exposed to the contentious politics of rural reform. He witnessed the battles fought over rural relief among the various Yunnanese political factions and watched how the Bank of China and the Nationalists’ CC Clique competed for influence in Yunnan through rural works projects. Through his bank work, Yang Kecheng would become quite powerful himself. After his initial experimental projects, he was tasked with expanding the bank’s rural development efforts across the province. This required recruiting and training high school graduates as well as creating bank offices in more than a dozen counties. By 1940, the Fudian New Bank’s rural development officers were administering loan programs such as one in Kaiyuan County, where trained directors sought and reviewed loan applications made by farmers (see chapter 6).5 By 1941, there were loan and cooperative efforts in seventy Yunnan counties; conspicuously absent, however, were the border regions dominated by non-Han minorities, where, Yang reported, microfinance was desperately needed but also treated with great suspicion.6 The suspicion was hard earned, as we will see, for the provincial state had used violence for decades to impose its programs—land surveys, military conscription, labor conscription, and opium eradication—on the Tai and Kachin communities of the West. Thus, while the state had been somewhat successful in pushing limited programs such as kapok and cotton cultivation into the borderlands (see chapter 6), the cost in alienating local communities and leaders had been high. By vocation and avocation, Yang Kecheng was dedicated to rural development. Because of his personal background, moreover, he also provided Miao Yuntai with a connection to the western Yunnan merchant corporations. In December 1937, less than a year into his new job, Yang was asked to accompany Miao to Burma, ostensibly to investigate the condition of the Burma Road project. But Miao planned to use the trip for other purposes as well, and he and Yang rendezvoused in Mandalay with Wang Zhenyu, the manager of Maoheng. Miao was searching for a cotton supplier because the Japanese invasion in July had cut off shipments from the Guo (Kwok) family’s Yong’an firm in Shanghai. Thus, Miao was turning to the Yunnanese firms to supply his new Yunnan Textile plant, and Yang Kecheng was to help. Later, Yang alleged (and there is some weak corroborating evidence) that Miao was also forcing the Yunnanese firms in Burma to smuggle banknotes, printed at the American Bank Note Company in the Bronx, into the province.7 What is known for sure, however, is that Yang’s connections supplied raw materials to one of Miao’s new industrial corporations.

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In the person of Yang Kecheng, then, we can appreciate how initially diffuse narratives of the past might become entangled. Son of a muleteer turned millionaire, Yang emerged from a family and corporate environment that had been deeply involved in the education revolutions in Mandalay and Xizhou. A product of the transnational Yunnanese merchant community and the successful acculturating pressures of the Minjia elite, Yang devoted himself to economic development by joining the Fudian New Bank, one of Miao’s state-run entrepreneurial institutions. A seemingly reluctant liaison between Miao and the transnational merchant firms, Yang Kecheng, however inadvertently, leads us to a time and place in which the corporate worlds, public and private, were colliding, with significant consequences for all involved. In this chapter, then, we examine how the institutions built under Miao’s supervision began to harness the power of private firms and how the development ambitions of Yunnanese officialdom also came to be focused on the Tai communities of the West, where the concepts of economic growth, national security, and cultural backwardness were wielded as weapons against indigenous authority. –•– When the Japanese invaded China in July 1937, the autonomous world of the Southwest provinces began to erode. The standard interpretation is that the central state, retreating inland from Japanese-occupied territories, challenged the previously autonomous provincial governments in Sichuan and Yunnan. The story is presented as a two-sided competition, with the ultimate triumph of the central government. While there is some truth in this story, the historical documents paint a more nuanced picture in which competing and cooperating groups cannot be easily divided into provincial and central. Miao Yuntai, for one, sought support and investment from his former Shanghai contacts in the central government. Thus, the wartime political upheaval provoked a range of complicated developments, although one relatively simple story still holds true: the state gained remarkable power through a process in which central government institutions were combined with and layered on top of those already established by the Yunnanese. To understand this increase in state power, we need to backtrack a few years. From 1915 to 1938, the Yunnan provincial government was not isolated from regional or national developments, but it was able to make many of its own choices. The fact that the province issued its own currency made the Fudian New Bank both powerful and, technically, a violator of national law, although the central



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government was unwilling to challenge Kunming on this issue.8 The central government in fact had little influence over Yunnan economic and political affairs. In 1931, for example, it established the National Foreign Trade Commission, which was theoretically endowed with the power to guide (zhidao) foreign trade. This included the mandate to record all foreign imports into China, investigate and record all foreign-Chinese financial interactions, and assess the reputations of overseas Chinese involved in trade.9 There is no evidence, however, that Yunnanese firms or their partners ever submitted to these regulations. Under these circumstances, the Yunnan provincial government was largely left to manage commerce and development as it saw fit, and when war loomed in 1937, it was the provincial government that made the first moves to place the commercial economy on a wartime footing. In the early years of the war, the provincial government did the dirty work, such as rounding up conscripted labor to work on the notorious Burma Road, the transportation link that would supply China’s armies after the railroad from Hanoi was cut. Conscription for the road-building teams hit borderlands communities particularly hard, and the British consul in Tengchong reported that this had “unsettled” the district.10 As the state mobilized labor to build a better roadway, Miao Yuntai also sought control over the goods and people who traveled it. Miao’s YEC established the Commission for Managing Yunnan’s Imports and Exports, which rapidly gained important leverage. Firm managers who wished to import or export certain commodities were legally obliged to petition the commission. As part of the application process, the managers had to provide detailed information, including firm name and address, commodity volume and weight, estimated cost of goods, destination, transporter, route, and buyer. The applicants also had to promise to sell any foreign currency earned to the Fudian New Bank and to buy foreign currency for purchasing imports from the bank. In a move that must have been designed to gain maximum influence, the commission designed its regulations to cover commodities that constituted the Yunnan trading firms’ core businesses: imports such as yarn, cotton cloth, and raw cotton, as well as exports including metals and minerals, oils, tea leaves, and the silk that had enriched western Yunnan traders for generations.11 The corporations did file applications, suggesting that the regulations were well enforced. In September 1938, for example, there were 273 petitions to the Imports and Exports Commission, an average of over nine per day. Powerful firms such as Maoheng and Yongchangxiang notified the commission of their silk and medicine exports.12 From the point of view of the British consul

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in Tengchong, where the commission established a headquarters, it looked as though the Yunnan government was seeking to “monopolise all industry”; the consul knew of one Tengchong merchant, for example, who had avoided the petition process, only to have his goods confiscated.13 Still, business remained brisk even as the firms felt the encroachment of the provincial state. As the Shanghai cotton imports were cut off, for example, the firms found a robust market for Burmese cotton imported via Tengchong, and Maoheng took a leading role in organizing shipments by truck. At the same time that the cotton business was booming and Maoheng was benefiting from its cooperation with Miao Yuntai’s Yunnan Textile, Miao’s Fudian New Bank stripped the merchant firms of a profitable sideline by taking over their remittance businesses (see chapter 3). Fudian New Bank built branches in Tengchong and Mandalay, which allowed it to handle all cross-border monetary transfers.14 Early in the war, then, the provincial state was gradually bringing the private firms under state control by extending authority over import/export permits, taking over the remittance business, and collecting information (through the permit petitions) about transnational commodity flows. By gaining supervision over and access to the networks built by private firms, the provincial state significantly expanded its influence. This was a process of state building that relied on the foundations of power already established by private corporations. Among the merchants, there was a sense of vulnerability; even the wealthiest entrepreneurs were not immune. In 1940, Long Shengwu, son of Long Yun and superintendent of the Tengchong and Longling regions, arrested two Maoheng shareholders for violating rice price controls.15 Although the two were later released, corporate shareholders—of even the largest private firms—clearly were subject to state discipline. As a result, the Yunnan trade firms began to change their business strategies. While personal vulnerability was a concern, it was the increasing influence of the state over commerce that had a larger impact. In the late 1930s, as the provincial government began to regulate silk exports, not only did the firms have to petition for export permission, they had to deposit with the state 60 percent of the foreign exchange value of the goods to be exported. To handle these large capital outlays, Yongchangxiang, Maoheng, and several other firms joined forces to establish the Yunnan-Burma Raw Silk Company (Dian Mian shengsi gongsi), thus creating a corporate partnership with some resemblance to a cartel, although its purpose seemed to be less about controlling prices than responding to the growth of state power.16 Internal company documents



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portray this partnership as the brainchild of Maoheng general manager Wang Youxi, and Maoheng committed the most capital (120,000 dollars) to the startup. Yongchangxiang committed 90,000 dollars, and three other partners contributed 90,000, 20,000, and 15,000 respectively. The firm was founded in April 1939; its board of directors was located in Kunming, and it established branches throughout the silk-producing regions of Sichuan. Each of these branches was provided with start-up capital, and while there was loose coordination from the main purchasing department (caibanbu) in Xufu (Yibin), each branch had the autonomy to purchase silk based on its reading of local markets.17 However, the Kunming headquarters maintained centralized control through the accounting and bookkeeping procedures that were now the foundations of Yunnan business practice. Branch managers dutifully reported expenses every ten days to the Xufu office, which collated these reports and passed them on to Kunming for review. As the trading firms cooperated to cope with provincial government regulations, the central government also began to extend its influence into Yunnan. The Central Bank of China first established a Kunming branch in 1937 but had to suspend operations in late 1938 when Yunnan authorities made it difficult to operate. Because the Yunnan economy was growing rapidly, however, there was increasing demand for capital, and provincial power holders were unable to prevent the national banks from establishing themselves through local investments. As the national banks gained footholds in the province’s corporations, the Yunnanese lost their monopoly over finance. Similarly, as central government institutions such as the National Resources Commission (NRC) entered Yunnan and began to hire workers locally, they paid them in national currency, meaning that the new Yunnan dollar was quickly overwhelmed. Through these processes, the bulwarks of Yunnanese autonomy—finance and currency independence—began to crumble.18 As the central government entered Yunnan, it invested in the institutions that were created by Yunnanese. The YEC’s enterprises, for example, were attractive investments for the central government banks, not just because mining and textiles were crucial to the war effort but because the firms were designed to return profits.19 The Bank of China and the NRC joined the YEC as the major investors in Gejiu Tin and the Yunnan Refinery, recombining the two into a single corporation, Yunnan Tin (Yunnan xiye gongsi). The Central and Jiaotong banks partnered with the YEC to expand the Yunnan textile industry by establishing the Yu Dian Textile Mill. While scholars have tended to depict

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these developments as a competition between the central and provincial governments, Miao Yuntai actually welcomed central government officials and their investments.20 The influx of outside capital, moreover, sparked remarkable industrial growth in the Kunming region.21 One estimate is that from 1938 to 1942, fifty factories were built within 100 kilometers of Kunming.22 As the central state’s presence increased, it turned to Miao and other provincial officials for support, often building on the foundation of existing provincial institutions—a process Joyce might recognize as “assemblage” and Kinzley would label “layering” (see chapter 4). The central government’s Trade Commission (Maoyi weiyuanhui), for example, took on the roles initially created by Yunnan’s Imports and Exports Commission, but it did so by placing Miao and his Yunnanese rival, Lu Chongren, on a Kunming-based branch of the Trade Commission, thus capitalizing on the power that these men had already won for the provincial commission.23 As new corporations were created, moreover, they were often joint ventures between central and provincial institutions. In May 1940, as the state sought to gain control over the Yunnan tea industry, for example, the centrally controlled China Tea Corporation joined with the Fudian New Bank to create a new firm, the Yunnan Tea Corporation. The new firm was capitalized with two 100,000 yuan investments, one from China Tea and one from Fudian New Bank.24 The corporation set up its purchasing and processing operations in southern Yunnan’s Fohai and Shunning counties with the goals of improving manufacturing standards through mechanization.25 They were hoping to take advantage of the tea production networks that Maoheng and Yongchangxiang had already created to link the southern Yunnan tea plantations to buyers in Kham and Tibet (see chapter 4). In 1941, the state also established in Xiaguan a new tea leaf processing factory that made brick tea for the Kham and Tibet markets. The factory was a joint venture by the Yunnan provincial government and representatives of the central government’s Mongolia and Tibet Commission (Meng Zang weiyuanhui).26 It was also a clear example of how the state was increasingly in the business of conquering private corporations. Over the long run, the private firms would remain in the tea business for another fourteen years, but Miao’s provincial corporations, in tandem with the central government institutions, were beginning to poach their business by creating competing corporations. Even as its institutions invested in joint ventures with the New Fudian Bank and the YEC, there were still aspects of the Yunnan economy that remained opaque to the central government. Thus, the NRC created the Economics



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Research Division (Jingji yanjiushi) to ferret out local economic information across China. The division paid particular attention to Yunnan, conducting forty-nine investigations of the province that were published as part of the Yunnan Economic Research Reports (Yunnan jingji yanjiu baogao), the Yunnan Industrial and Mining Research Reports (Yunnan gongkuang diaocha baogao), and the Tungsten and Tin Ore Research Reports (Wuxi kuangye diaocha baogao). In their research into mining, the central government teams sometimes uncovered surprises. When they looked into Lijiang’s Dagu region, which was rich in gold dust, for example, they discovered a company, established in 1939, that was developing the most promising Dagu finds. This company was Yu Li Mining (Yu Li kuangye gongsi), and it was capitalized at 200,000 yuan. A shareholder and vice president of the board was Miao Yuntai, and the general manager was Maoheng’s Wang Shaoyan.27 Thus, beneath the surface of the state corporations’ competition with private firms, Miao and entrepreneurs were business partners, in this case exploiting the minerals lying beneath the soil of borderlands’ indigenous communities. In the case of Yu Li Mining, as in so many other cases in the Southwest, the indigenous communities themselves did not benefit because they were neither shareholders nor hired labor; at Yuli, the labor force was primarily recruited from Sichuanese migrants.28 When he became involved in Yu Li Mining, Wang Shaoyan was branching out from Maoheng’s core businesses. This seems to have been a deliberate response to growing state intervention in trade as well as increased investment opportunities in other sectors. Maoheng records show that the company was investing in a wide range of private and state companies, including retail medicines (Zhengyi Medicine), financial institutions (Huiye Bank, Kunming City Bank), transport (Yunnan Transport Company, Ge Bi Shi Rail), media (Minyi ribao), and their own textile mill, Yun Mao, which we will encounter in the Epilogue.29 In the early 1940s, Maoheng incorporated as a limited liability company, defining its operations as import and export trade, as one would expect, but also labeling itself an “investment enterprise” (touzi qiye), which it had been forced to become.30 After the war, these patterns of investment would continue, with Maoheng’s Wang Zhenyu drawn into a Zhejiang-run Cotton Textile enterprise, probably by Wang Zhenfang (no relation).31 The Yongchangxiang merchants also began investing more widely, including in a major hydroelectric project near their Xizhou homes; the project was spearheaded by Miao Yuntai and the YEC.32

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First linked to Miao Yuntai through the offices of Yang Kecheng, the western Yunnan merchant firms found their association with Miao and his increasingly powerful state institutions to be transformative. By the end of the war, Maoheng and Yongchangxiang were still in the silk and cotton business, but they were no longer simply the transnational trading companies that had rarely strayed far from their core businesses. They were increasingly looking to invest broadly, and Maoheng in particular was reconfigured as an investment company that was also building its own mechanized textile mill. To some degree these changes were a product of the opportunities brought by the industrial expansion of Yunnan (especially since there were profitable investments to be made in the YEC’s efficient corporations). But the companies’ boards were also forced to alter their strategies in response to the government’s developmental ambitions. Those same developmental ambitions would also have an impact on the borderlands Tai communities located just to the west of the merchant towns of Tengchong and Heshun. –•– Western Yunnan’s Tai communities had troubled would-be state builders and Han nationalists for decades. In western Yunnan, the so-called Teng Long border region included the Tai Le (sometimes called the Tai Nüa) principalities of Nandian, Ganyai, and Mangshi, as well as a number of others. From a Han nationalist point of view, the most troubling aspect was the difficulty in establishing state power over the Tai rulers, whose families inherited the right to govern and extract resources from their commoner subjects. The leaders of these principalities were the saophas, the lords of the sky—hereditary princes who managed local bureaucracies, raised their own militias, and intermarried with the nobility of Burma’s Shan States, which were also the domains of Tai princes.33 (In this chapter, the Tai subject to colonial Burma are called “Tai Shan” to differentiate them from western Yunnan’s Tai Le, who are referred to simply as “Tai.”) Although the Tai Shan and Tai shared common linguistic, cultural, and kinship connections, each was subject to pressures from a different empire, and this led to divergent experiences of modern state building. Because of Tai connections with the Tai Shan, however, it was often an open question among Han nationalists as to whether the western Yunnan saophas were loyal to China. In the late Qing, modern state builders such as Zuo Zongtang had targeted hereditary indigenous leaders across the empire. In Yunnan, Cen Yuying, followed later by Xiliang and then Republican statesmen, also sought to remove



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indigenous leaders from power. As Xiliang realized and others would learn, it was particularly difficult to unseat the powerful Tai saophas. Still, this became an important goal and was pursued for decades. After the 1911 revolution, Li Genyuan, a Tengchong native, had recommended abolishing the saopha position. Of course, Li had emerged from the Tengchong and Heshun merchant environment that seemed particularly ill disposed toward the Tai elite. In the early part of the century, Tengchong men had participated in the education programs designed to civilize the Tai. Later, in the 1930s, the Heshun Chongxin Association would argue for a military occupation of Ganyai. The association continued to maintain that the Tai would benefit from receiving a good Chinese education designed to help them evolve (jinhua).34 Having traversed the saopha lands on their way to Burma and, in some cases, having attended middle school with saopha offspring, the merchants of Tengchong and Heshun were more personally connected to these issues than most other Chinese, but their ideas reflected those of a broader public, and there were numerous efforts over the first half of the twentieth century to reform governance in Yunnan’s western borderlands.35 As noted in chapters 3 and 4, these efforts were often linked to concepts of cultural and economic development, which were to be imposed by outsiders who were presumably more advanced. Ironically, however, there had emerged a reform tradition among the local Tai, dating to Dao Anren’s participation in the Revolutionary Alliance and his efforts to improve Ganyai’s economy and schools. It is said that Dao had even presented Sun Yat-sen with a plan for progressive, saopha-led regional reforms. As a Chinese revolutionary and a Tai reformer, Dao Anren may well have envisioned a future in which one could be both an ethnic Tai, with some control over one’s future, and a citizen of a broader Chinese state that also included Han citizens. However, Anren’s plan is unfortunately no longer extant, and we therefore do not know precisely what he envisioned.36 The relationship between the Tai elite and the various incarnations of the Chinese state were rarely so cordial as Anren’s relationship with Sun may have been. Working in the tradition of Zuo Zongtang, in which indigenous elite participation in modernization was usually unthinkable, the Yunnan state was capable of outrageous acts of violence as it sought to extend its power to tax, conscript, and develop. That violence was often reciprocated by Tai militias or commoners. In 1924, for example, Anren’s son, Dao Baotu (aka Dao Jingban), was reportedly enraged by Yunnan soldiers who burned the Ganyai saopha’s residence and took

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his mother hostage. In retaliation, the Ganyai Tai expelled Han Chinese from their territories, killing an estimated one hundred souls. The atrocities continued when Yunnan soldiers took revenge by destroying as many as seventy-three Tai villages.37 In the ensuing investigation, the British consul implied that Han officials were to blame for starting the violence, and the subsequent withdrawal of Yunnan troops from Ganyai suggests that Kunming may have come to the same conclusion.38 But this is not how the incidents would be collectively remembered. Instead, Dao Baotu was remembered as instigating an anti-Han movement that was part of a larger conspiracy to oppress Han in the borderland regions.39 Conflict was reignited in the late 1920s when there were efforts to impose a new administrative structure on the Nandian and Ganyai principalities, which would henceforth be known, respectively, as the Lianghe and Yingjiang Bureaus (shezhiju). The goal was to use the new bureaus to undermine saopha political, economic, and legal power. Particularly provocative were efforts by the provincial government to survey and tax saopha lands.40 The conflict became violent in 1935 when the Lianghe bureau chief turned to the military to enforce tax collection in Nandian. In response, the Nandian saopha recruited five hundred Kachin to bolster his militia, forcing the chief to quickly evacuate his family to Tengchong before himself receiving a fortunate transfer back to Kunming. According to British and Tengchong sources, the key to keeping this conflict from exploding into warfare was the local chamber of commerce, the merchants of Tengchong and Heshun, who mediated for the state.41 Three years later, however, in 1938, as the state sought again to survey land and impose opium taxes, local Tai, Kachin, and even Han attacked the Lianghe Bureau’s office, setting it on fire and killing up to twenty people. The attack sent yet another bureau chief scurrying away. British observers believed that the violence was instigated by the ruthless recruitment of labor for building the Burma Road, along with further land surveys and proposed opium taxes.42 With the Nandian saopha’s subjects in revolt, the provincial government arrested saopha Gong Shou, but this did not reduce the tensions, and it was reported that other saophas were exploring the possibility of placing their principalities under the jurisdiction of British Burma.43 For the next decade, the issue of saopha collusion with the British—and the alleged Tai desire for either independence or autonomy—would be the subject of central and provincial government concern, as well as explosive media coverage. Within this context, the provincial authorities would ramp up plans to transform the region through political reform and economic development. Within the Tai elite,



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while it was generally accepted that progressive reforms were needed, the point of often violent contention was whether outsiders, especially the Chinese state, should be leading the way. The Tai nobility had as good a claim as other Yunnan elites to lead progressive reform. Like the merchants of the western Yunnan trade towns, they had been engaged with transnational ideas for several generations. In his day, Dao Anren had traveled widely in Southeast Asia and Japan, personally engaging with the broader world in ways that paralleled the experiences of other elite Yunnanese. Based on his experiences, Anren had joined a revolutionary movement that envisioned a republican China, but he also sought local economic and political autonomy. There is much evidence that Anren’s sons and grandsons had inherited his thinking. In 1939, the British consul in Tengchong, G. E. Stockley, visited Anren’s grandson, saopha Dao Chengyue, finding Chengyue dressed in European clothes and angry at the lack of Tai representation in the Nationalist government. Like other elite Tai, Chengyue had received his education at the Huaqiao Middle School in Rangoon, where he was taught in Mandarin and English.44 Thus, he was a man of some experience. He understood what representative government was supposed to look like, and, given his grandfather’s support for the 1911 revolution, Chengyue felt that the Tai of western Yunnan deserved better representation. Based on Stockley’s report, moreover, Chengyue was in favor of establishing a “Special Area” for the Tai principalities, but trying to understand what precisely Dao Chengyue may have meant by a Special Area takes some careful historical investigation.45 When interpreting Dao Chengyue’s ideas, we need to take care. His concepts were, in this case, filtered through a British civil servant. Nevertheless, those ideas were part of a larger discussion among the Tai, although it is difficult to reconstruct this discussion because it exploded into a political and media sensation. Much of the evidence for the Tai elite’s discussion, in fact, comes from the Nationalist government’s military intelligence, gathered from Han residing in western Yunnan. The intelligence was then used to accuse Dao Chengyue and others of treason.46 But some of the intelligence reports were exaggerated or taken out of context, including the 1948 report that Chengyue’s father, Dao Baotu, had helped establish the Western Yunnan Baiyi Independence Planning Commission, meaning he was planning for the independence from China of the Baiyi, a pejorative term used for the Tai.47 When this type of information was picked up by the press, the reports were

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further sensationalized. It was claimed, for instance, that the Tai elite were arming themselves with weapons from demobilizing soldiers and that they were fomenting independence movements among the Khampas of Sichuan and Yunnan.48 When these stories were reported in media outlets, they ignited deep-seated fears and passions in the Han public, fueled by the knowledge that independent governments already existed in Mongolia and Tibet. There were immediate calls for the eradication of the saopha system.49 The charges against Dao Baotu, his son Dao Chengyue, and others were trumped up, and they were accused of colluding with the Japanese, murdering government officials, and even plotting to create an independent state variously referred to as the Baiyi Race Kingdom (Baiyizu wangguo) or the Nanzhao Federated Republic—Nanzhao being a provocative reference to an independent Yunnan kingdom that flourished in the eighth and ninth centuries.50 It is perhaps best to understand these more extreme accusations as early examples of the Han Chinese media and government paranoia about minority separatism, a paranoia now reflected in the twenty-first century by exaggerated fears about and brutal persecution of Tibetans and Uyghurs. Given the evidence base and the politics involved, how might we understand what Dao Chengyue may have meant by a Special Area? What was the nature of the Tai elite discussion in the 1940s? The concept of a Special Area had been around at least since 1935, when the nine saophas of western Yunnan had petitioned the central government with a plan for a borderlands region in which they would continue holding power but would cede control over foreign affairs to the Chinese government in return for financial support for educational and development projects.51 Chengyue’s views, as reported by Stockley, were related to the petition and therefore reflected ideas held by other Tai elites, especially those in Ganyai, Nandian, and Mangshi. The British interpreted these ideas as either a desire for governance under British Burma or for governance that imitated the type of autonomy enjoyed by the Shan States’ saophas.52 Given that Chengyue’s grandfather, Dao Anren, had fought against British incursions into Ganyai in the 1890s, it seems unlikely that his son and grandson would seek to place themselves under British supervision.53 However, it is likely that the Tai elite understood many of the changes taking place in the Shan States. We know that Dao Chengyue and others were educated in Burma, and Chinese intelligence reported that the Tai elite had frequent interaction with northern Burma, often traveling to the Shan States in 1946 during the early days of the Burmese independence movement.54



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If the Tai were well aware of developments in the Shan States, then they witnessed a political process that sought a legitimate place for indigenous elites in the modern state. Since the British invasion in the 1880s, Upper Burma (the Frontier Areas) had been ruled separately from Lower Burma (Ministerial Burma) through the protectorate system, with the Tai Shan saophas exercising a form of autonomy patterned after the Indian princely states on the South Asian subcontinent.55 In 1922, the saopha principalities were linked together for the first time under the Federated Shan States, and a British commissioner was appointed to chair the Federated Shan Chiefs Council, which coordinated limited collective governance. A council of saophas was also formed and its members acted as advisers to the governor, giving Tai Shan elites direct access to the highest office in the colonial government. In other words, despite increasing government oversight, the elite Tai Shan still had a remarkable amount of autonomy and input, at least when compared to their relatives in Yunnan. These changes were not universally admired by the Tai Shan leaders but were generally accepted.56 In 1931, the colonial state convened the Burma Round Table Conference, which would plan for the future of Burma as it separated from India. The Tai Shan elite won the chance to participate in the conference, and three saophas were invited to join. The conference produced the Government of Burma Act of 1935: Burma would have its own parliament, but the Shan States would simultaneously create a Council of Chiefs, chaired by a British commissioner, which could bypass parliament and continue to deal directly with the governor of Burma. From 1938 to 1942, the years before Japanese invasion, the commissioner for the Council of Chiefs, Philip Fogarty, encouraged saopha participation in broader governance issues.57 From the point of view of the Tai saophas in Yunnan, then, these developments must have seemed more rational than the ongoing, sometimes violent, actions of the provincial and central governments in China. Far from seeking to abolish the saophas’ positions, the stance of many Chinese authorities since Zuo Zongtang’s era, the colonial government in Burma had institutionalized saopha authority and participation. After the war, as Burma, ever in the shadow of India, stumbled toward independence, there was ongoing concern about preserving autonomy in the Shan States. The Tai Shan elite remained suspicious of Aung San and the Bamar nationalists who were leading the independence movement. When Aung San set off to negotiate independence with British prime minister Clement Atlee, for example, the Tai Shan saophas notified the prime minister by telegram that Aung San represented only the Bamar of Lower Burma, not the diverse peoples of Upper Burma.58

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At this time, the Tai Shan, Chin, and Kachin began to discuss the goal of uniting the “Frontier Area peoples” in demanding inclusion on their own terms in the new nation. It was increasingly clear that Burma would be granted independence, but the shape of independence was yet to be decided. In response, Tai Shan, Kachin, and Chin leaders gathered in March 1946 to talk with Bamar representatives about the future for the Frontier Areas. This initial meeting was followed in February 1947 by the famous Panglong Conference. There, Tai Shan and Kachin representatives asked for and received internal autonomy as a precondition for incorporation into a federated Burma, and the Tai Shan also received the right to secede from Burma after a ten-year trial run. (With Aung San’s assassination just a few months later, the promise of ethnic cooperation—and autonomy—was famously and perhaps tragically undermined, and Burma’s history of ethnic insurgency and conflict was set in motion.)59 The extent and nature of the Tai knowledge of these developments is still uncertain, but given that Dao Baotu’s brother and other Tai visited the Shan States during the independence process, it is reasonable to expect that the Tai leaders were talking about and interested in the concepts of political and economic reform, including the types of autonomy enjoyed by the Tai Shan. In addition to the reported visits to Burma, there is one more reason for believing that the saopha families were well informed about developments in the Shan States. In April 1947, the British government opened an inquiry into the future of the Frontier Areas. While the British were a little late (the Panglong Agreement was already signed), the inquiry interviewed dozens of representatives, drawn from the Tai Shan, Kachin, Chin, and other borderlanders, and these interviews reveal how the participants felt about their future. The Tai Shan saophas all sent representatives to testify, and this included the Hsenwi saopha Sao Hom Hpa, who had negotiated and signed the Panglong Agreement. When the Hsenwi representative met with the Frontier Areas Committee, he supported joining the new nation but only if Hsenwi preserved significant internal autonomy.60 His testimony reflected the ideas of the saopha, Sao Hom Hpa, and since Sao Hom Hpa also happened to be the brother-in-law of Dao Baotu (who was married to his half-sister, Sao Hkan Hkam), it is likely that detailed news of these developments was passed on to Baotu.61 While we do not have the writings of the Tai elite themselves, the evidence suggests that they understood and were interested in the politics of autonomy as they were being worked out in the conferences and committees of Burma’s



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Frontier Areas. Given the fact that Nationalist military intelligence believed that Dao Baotu, Dao Chengyue, and others were organizing their own conferences, it is reasonable to believe that the Tai elite were meeting to plan for a political future that they controlled. But there was a major difference between the elite Tai experience in Burma and China. Despite their lengthy history of imperial horrors, the British supported the Tai Shan, Kachin, Chin, and other frontier peoples in the quest for autonomy. The Tai and other borderlands peoples in China had no such makeweight. As the saophas sought, however selfishly, to create a future in which they, and perhaps their subjects, had some autonomy, they only fueled the culture of Chinese repression of indigenous elites that had emerged in the nineteenth century. There were increasing calls for the abolition of the Tai hereditary elite, who were called a “national cancer,” and the Yunnan provincial government drew up plans for removing them from power.62 By 1948, under pressure from the media and many within the provincial and national state, a compromise was reached. When Dao Baotu was interviewed in the national Dagong newspaper, he publicly denied any connection to an independence movement and, using the discourse of backwardness, proclaimed that “the races of the borderlands [suffer from] a backwardness of culture, but they do not lag behind in patriotism.”63 Forced to acknowledge patriotism as defined by others and to submit to the discourse of backwardness, Dao Baotu ceded important rhetorical high ground in return for survival. Since the times were chaotic, the Nationalist government agreed to drop the treason charges and to temporarily preserve the status quo; the saophas would stay for the time being. As Wang Chunqiao notes, each side pulled back from the brink, and a political compromise prevented the pursuit of a military solution.64 By backing away from the call for autonomy as well as submitting to the discourse of backwardness, Dao Baotu was forced into providing an opening for the type of development discourse that brought disempowerment with it. Although there are numerous examples of how such discourse was linked to the politics of western Yunnan in the 1940s, perhaps the most important set of plans was proposed by the Yunnan official Lu Chongren. Born into the one of the upwardly mobile Yi clans of northeast Yunnan, which were, says Pan Xianlin, proud of Yi history and opposed to Han prejudice, Lu nevertheless revealed that he and other Yi elites did not identify with other minorities.65 From his position of significant power in Kunming, Lu would embrace the concept of civilizing the Tai through economic development.

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For Lu, as for so many other officials of the time, economic development was designed to serve the state, especially state security. In Yunnan, concerns with state security almost always focused on the national border, and from his position in the provincial civil administration, Lu took this problem head on by creating the Border Administration Planning Committee (Bianjiang xingzheng sheji weiyuanhui). The goal of the committee was to solidify government control in strategic border areas, and they focused on the Teng Long (Tengchong and Longling) area precisely because of its ethnic diversity. In the wake of the war, Lu’s committee was particularly worried about pan-Thai ideology, spread by the Japanese as well as the newly named Thailand, and allegedly embraced by some Tai elites as part of their movement toward independence.66 To combat the perceived challenges of pan-Thai identity and potential separatism, the committee developed a comprehensive program for what it called “civilizing” (kaihua) and “developing” (kaifa) the Teng Long borderlands. The state was to be the “motive force” behind this civilizing and development project, which included ambitious plans to oust local Tai elites, build out state infrastructure, create hydroelectric plants and cotton mills, and manage economic development through state institutions.67 Lu’s plans were only one of many such efforts, and it is valuable to introduce a few of the others here. From the late 1930s onward, countless surveys had led to numerous economic development plans for western Yunnan and other southwestern borderlands regions.68 As early as 1938, the Central Government’s Relief Commission had created the Western Yunnan Border Regions Investigation Team.69 The team left Kunming in November 1938 and traveled the Burma Road through Mangshi, Mengmao, and Longchuan, surveying the saopha regions with the goal of finding areas where Han migrants might be settled. As with many of these surveys, the agricultural landscape of Tai regions was compared to idealized conceptions of eastern China, where the norm was intensive agriculture on small plots. When the team found different landscapes, such as large tracts of supposedly unused land in Mangshi, they labeled this as wastefulness and blamed the saophas. The implication was that these lands should be under a particular type of cultivation, a conclusion that ignored local land use, including, ironically, the fact that some of these were pastoral lands for the horses and mules owned by the merchant firms of western Yunnan. If the land was truly being wasted, it was because of the importance of the mule trains in the commercial economy controlled by private corporations, not because of saopha greed and conservatism. As they would in Kham in the



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1950s (see chapter 4), central government investigators often misrepresented the local complexities, especially the evidence of corporate power in the structuring of local economic relations. This convenient misrepresentation helped create a discourse of underdevelopment that blamed the indigenous elite and provided a justification for intervention from the outside.70 In other words, the surveys and investigations highlighted some facts and suppressed others to produce alleged truths that became repeated and well accepted.71 The alleged truths that became well accepted included the concept that indigenous peoples did not yet share the same modernity as the Han. Indigenous communities were labeled backward in economic and political organization, a rhetoric of power that would be most thoroughly exploited by the Communist Party in the 1950s.72 Along the Yunnan-Burma border, the central and provincial governments consistently portrayed non-Han peoples as living in the past, a people trapped and unable to be modern. This was certainly the case for the portrayal of the Tai, whose princely leaders, the saopha, were identified as the major obstacles to development because they were leftovers from a “feudal” age.73 And it was true for other groups as well. The central government’s Ministry of Agriculture and Forestry, for example, designated the Wa as a people still living in the “tribal era,” arguing that they therefore needed mining and agricultural development to civilize (jiaohua) them.74 These claims created a developmental discourse that rationalized and institutionalized prejudice and subordination. The developmental discourse was, in turn, increasingly transformed into state initiatives and institutions designed to implement disempowered development. For the Teng Long region, Lu’s Border Administration Planning Committee was a clear example. For the Kham region, the Ministry of Agriculture and Forestry began to build out an administrative infrastructure to develop this “troublesome” area. At key locations, they established a system of directorates (zhidao ju) for coordinating more systematic reforms in education, agricultural and livestock improvement, and other economic processes.75 As part of this effort, the ministry began collecting startlingly precise information about the local economy. For example, each county magistrate was ordered to survey the number of horses, water buffalo, and other livestock. Included in the surveys were the prices that animals fetched at market, the statistics on local livestock diseases, and statistical summaries of the animal products produced in each location.76 In hindsight, we can see how these developments, when layered into the assemblage that became the People’s Republic, might produce a state where

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outside control over indigenous resources was all but inevitable. In the 1940s, however, there were still opportunities for different outcomes. While it was true that most of the development plans of Lu Chongren and others provided no voice for local communities, the Tai elite still sought to be heard, and the message they conveyed was that they could create their own development plans. Perhaps the best known of these plans came from Fang Kesheng, a scion of the Mangshi saopha clan. Educated in Rangoon and knowledgeable about the political processes in Burma and China, Fang Kesheng took it upon himself to develop a plan for the Teng Long region. His plan has survived and is stored in the Shanghai Municipal Library under the title Jianshe Teng Long bianqu ge tusi di yijianshu (Ideas for Developing the Tusi Lands of the Teng Long Border Region). This was not the first plan for this region, of course. As we know, Dao Anren had presented Sun Yat-sen with some sort of plan, and some of Fang’s contemporaries had offered their ideas as well.77 Still, Fang’s plan is of great interest because of its origin and vision. Fang Kesheng was deeply involved in local and regional politics. He had served as regent in both his home principality of Mangshi and Mengmao as well. The Nationalist government recognized his influence, and in the wake of the violence that saw the Lianghe bureau chief flee from Nandian, Fang was appointed to the post of bureau chief in 1935 as part of an effort to restore order by recognizing the authority of local Tai. Like Dao Baotu, Fang had fought against the Japanese during the war, and he joined the discussions of autonomy for western Yunnan. In late 1947, however, as the media pressure mounted, Fang was also part of the efforts to compromise with the state. He was chosen as a delegate to the 1948 People’s Participatory Conference in Nanjing, and when he arrived there, he composed Ideas, had it printed in Shanghai, and discussed it with central government officials. The major goals of Ideas were to introduce his home region to the authorities while also making a case for preserving the saopha (tusi) institution.78 A close reading of Fang’s Ideas reveals that it is designed to educate as well as to persuade. The education was to come through basic descriptions of the Teng Long region, and the persuasion took the form of countering the negative media representations of the Tai, including the ideas that they were anti-Han and opposed to modern development. In the opening section, Fang emphasized the natural wealth and ethnic diversity of the Teng Long region, as well as its similarities to northern Burma. At the same time, he challenged assumptions about the backward and closed nature of the Teng Long economy and society.



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In response to the charge that the saophas did not allow land reclamation, Fang noted that they had long invited immigrants to the region, providing them with seed and oxen to help them open new agricultural lands. He acknowledged that those immigrants might have faced a language barrier because locals often did not speak Chinese, but Fang blamed this on the state, noting that Tai feared government schools because they thought that Chinese-language skills increased their chances of being pressed into the army. While Fang also admitted that the local economy was underdeveloped, he highlighted recent experiments, such as the programs for planting kapok, tea, tobacco, and tung oil trees that were underway in Mangshi. And he pointed to earlier ventures such as a pineapple cannery in Mangshi that provided evidence of entrepreneurial ambitions even though they had failed.79 Central to Fang’s argument was the important role that the saophas played. Like the Minjia merchant families in Xizhou, Fang argued that he and other elite families were descended from Han migrants, who had acculturated to local customs and languages over the centuries. This made them both loyal to the nation and deeply sympathetic to the border peoples. Because the saophas were committed to local and national affairs, they could, Fang said, manage local peoples while faithfully carrying out the orders of the state. In short, the saophas were to be a bridge between the state and the borderlands peoples.80 Given the recent history of Tai efforts to pursue autonomy, skeptics would have questioned Fang’s protestations of unwavering loyalty, but no one should doubt that he was offering a radically different vision for the future. It was a vision of cooperation between the Chinese state and indigenous elites, an approach that had been rejected by Zuo Zongtang and many others after the 1870s. In offering this vision, Fang clearly outlined many of the same goals as statesmen such as Lu Chongren and his Border Administration Planning Committee: development of natural resources, creation of mechanized industry and transport, improved financial services, and better education for Tai youth. These were things, after all, that the saophas had been working toward for decades. They had tried planting rubber trees, sought to build roads (for commerce and, to be fair, to further their enjoyment of motoring in cars imported from Burma), and even established a porcelain factory.81 While Fang outlined goals that resembled those of Lu’s Border Committee, there was a vast difference between the two plans’ visions of leadership and beneficiaries. Lu Chongren envisioned a top-down state-run development process that was controlled by outsiders, and it was unclear whether local people would

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have any place in his schemes. He planned to import labor for new mines, for instance, and he would abolish saopha power, transferring many of their lands not to locals but to the state.82 For Fang, the goal was not to exclude outsiders; he proposed that the saophas cooperate with the state in promoting local industry. But he also wanted to transform the local economy from one in which Tai were disempowered producers of primary products for sale to Han merchants to one in which Tai were empowered to develop their own light industries using local raw materials to produce goods for export to China and abroad. He no longer wanted to see local primary products exported to Kunming for processing, and he proposed that Chinese banks move into Mangshi to provide loans to create locally controlled enterprise. He also wanted locals to have access to Yang Kecheng’s cooperative program, suggesting that borderlands residents needed access to capital just as the saophas needed to have opportunities for investing in businesses.83 In Ideas, Fang Kesheng provided a vision for the borderlands that countered the developmental discourse of subordination. It was a call for effective schools to teach Tai children by giving them access to trained, local teachers who were skilled in local languages. It was an invitation for technical programs to bring agricultural, mining, industrial, and engineering skills to borderlands communities. The plan, Fang claimed, would gradually lower the barriers that separated Tai from Han.84 In hindsight, it was a vision that pushed back against the power of private corporations and the obsession of the state to build its own corporations and arrogate for itself the right to manage borderlands resources. It was also a vision that would largely be rejected.

Epilogue Conquest of Corporations

the Communist occupation of Yunnan, which was proclaimed on December 9, 1949. When the Yunnan People’s Government was established in October 1950, Yang was appointed to its executive committee. With his degree in business management and his experience in rural development, Yang would participate in the province’s economic planning. To prepare him for this task, he was invited to Northeast China to learn about the Communist state’s forms of economic organization, which largely relied on the institutions and practices of the former National Resources Commission (NRC).1 As in the 1940s, Yang’s most dramatic role in the revolutionary years had more to do with who he was than with what he could do. On January 20, 1952, he attended a mass meeting in Kunming, where he was to speak on the Three-Antis Movement: a Communist-Party-led public movement designed to identify and punish entrepreneurs and bureaucrats who were guilty of corruption, waste, and bribery. According to a report from the New China News Agency, when Yang took the podium, he was handed and then read an indictment that implicated Yongchangxiang’s general manager, Yang’s older brother Yan Xiecheng. The report claims that Xiecheng was at home, listening to the meeting on the radio and weeping. Within twenty-four hours, the shareholders of Yongchangxiang and Maoheng had met and admitted to improprieties. These developments shocked the corporate class in Kunming and proved to be a major turning point in the period from 1949 to 1956, when the Communist YANG KECHENG WELCOMED

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state was still unsure as to how private corporations would be integrated into the planned economy. Up to this point, Yongchangxiang had continued running its import/export and investment enterprises, while Maoheng maintained some import/export activities but invested most of its capital in the new, private Yun Mao Textile Mill. The two firms’ survival was a result of ongoing adaptability as well as the new state’s efforts to keep private firms afloat. In the months after seizing power in Kunming, the new government had quickly gained control of Yunnan’s state-run corporations, including those created and nurtured by Miao Yuntai’s Yunnan Economic Commission (YEC): the Yunnan and Yu Dian textile mills, Yunnan Tin, and the Yunnan Tea Corporation. In other words, the YEC had provided the new government with a solid foundation in textile manufacturing, mining, and other industries. At the same time, the new government had followed national policy and aided private firms. Like Miao Yuntai in the 1930s, the Communist Party envisioned, at least initially, that private capital would play a supporting role in the nation’s economic development. By providing loans and government contracts, the state helped businesses rebound after the civil war.2 However, it was still unclear to economic planners exactly how to integrate private corporations into the emerging planned economy, but in the early 1950s at least, there was no plan for nationalizing private corporations.3 By 1950, Yongchangxiang was widely invested in various enterprises, even expanding its interests by investing in tin processing facilities at Gejiu. Still, its core businesses remained at the heart of operations. It had tea processing facilities at Xiaguan and Kunming, and it continued to ship tea to Kham and Tibet. In Sichuan, it owned two silk processing facilities, one of which was, after the creation of the Yunnan Burma Silk Company (see chapter 7), jointly owned with Maoheng. It had its branch in Mandalay to coordinate the silk imports and the cotton textile exports to China.4 To bolster Yongchangxiang’s transnational capabilities, general manager Yan Xiecheng had transferred more personnel to Mandalay and Hong Kong. At the same time, Kunming remained the hub of operations, and, as a member of the Chamber of Commerce, Yan welcomed the Communist occupation, participating in the ceremonies for the new government. He joined a Kunming committee promoting the sales of victory bonds and was a leading subscriber himself. In a move that revealed the importance of its cotton imports, Yan and Yongchangxiang signed a contract with the newly established provincial General Trading Company (Yunnansheng maoyi

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zonggongsi), the state-managed corporation designed to coordinate the manufacture and distribution of key commodities.5 The contracting system was introduced by the national government to link private firms to the planned economy, and, in Yunnan, Yongchangxiang was the first private commercial firm to participate by importing raw cotton for the state-run Yunnan and Yu Dian mills. For Yongchangxiang and other transnational trading firms, the contract system provided some continuity with the past.6 Yongchangxiang and Maoheng, for instance, had contracted with the YEC to supply cotton to the Yunnan Textile Mill. While the concept of a government contract was not new, the larger context in which these contracts operated was beginning to change. Through the General Trading Company, the new government began to establish state-controlled wholesaling and retailing outlets. Very quickly, the private firms came to rely on state-run entities to buy and distribute their commodities, meaning that competitive markets were beginning to disappear. By undermining markets, the new government had, probably unintentionally at first, made it increasingly difficult to operate private firms.7 Because Yunnan was a border province, its commerce faced further restrictions. Just as the wartime Yunnan government had sought to register import and export activity, the new government imposed similar controls. It did this through the General Trade Company, which began to spin off new corporations designed to control strategic commodities, such as textiles and minerals.8 In November 1950, the General Trade Company’s cotton, yarn, and cloth section was transformed into the Southwestern Regional Branch of the China Cotton, Yarn, and Cloth Corporation (China Cotton), which was authorized to supply cotton to and distribute products from the state and private textile mills. China Cotton asserted control over the importing of all cotton and cotton goods, and Yongchangxiang found that it could only do business while under contract with China Cotton.9 In addition, the General Trade Company created an office for managing all imports and exports that, like the old wartime Import and Export Commission, required private firms to petition for permission to move commodities across national boundaries. This allowed the state to use the petitions to gain knowledge of how transnational trade was managed, and, in 1951, it established the Yunnan Import and Export Corporation, a new competitor to the private trade firms.10 From early on, then, the Communist state was building new corporate institutions that would compete with the large international firms such as Yongchangxiang.

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For a time, Yongchangxiang found these developments to be manageable. By 1951, the firm was recovering from the wartime years. It was processing brick tea and shipping it to Kham and Tibet. The firm’s silk business was recovering, and it was exporting about 80 percent of the Sichuan silk going to Burma. With the state contracting system in place, it was importing about 17 percent of Kunming’s raw cotton. Still, there were signs of trouble. As the firm’s autonomy was restricted, shareholders began pulling money out of the company.11 And as state contracts became increasingly important to Yongchangxiang’s survival, it is possible that the firm’s managers succumbed to the perils of corruption and bribery. If so, they would not have been the first, and it was the increasingly cozy relationships between state and private firms that sparked the Three-Antis Campaign, which was soon followed by a similar Five-Antis Campaign.12 The campaigns brought official scrutiny to Yongchangxiang’s business practices, leading to Yang Kecheng’s astonishing accusation that his brother’s firm was violating the law. With the corruption investigations underway, Yongchangxiang ownership and management spent most of 1952 caught up in struggle meetings, the Communist Party tactic where suspects endured relentless pressure to disclose crimes, whether real or not, against the party. This process left managers little time to run the business, says Yan Xiangcheng, who was part of the management team at that time.13 The investigations resulted in large fines that further ate into capital, and as Yan Xiecheng sold off assets to pay the fines, the firm was struggling, its managerial energy sapped and its links to the Mandalay and Hong Kong branches fraying.14 Since 1903, the firm had relied on an increasingly powerful and centralized management system, with effective bookkeeping, communications, and incentive systems to align branch management actions with headquarters’ plans. This had allowed the firm to coordinate business activities across vast distances. By 1953, these systems were being undermined, primarily by the new government but also by instability in Burma and the emerging geopolitics of mainland China’s separation from Hong Kong. Although the state sought to support Yongchangxiang with loans, the firm’s profits plummeted. In 1954, the firm’s leadership sought more state contracts to bolster earnings, but those contracts were now dwindling as the new government allowed the Yunnan Import and Export Corporation to manage a greater percentage of the business, including the vital silk exports. To make matters worse, it was at this time that tea production and sales were nationalized under the China Tea Company (Zhongguo chaye gongsi), effectively pushing private firms out of another lucrative

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business.15 Yongchangxiang had never faced such severe government control and competition, even during the war when Miao’s YEC had begun regulating imports and creating state-run firms to compete in some industries. Yongchangxiang ownership increasingly found itself in an economy that had no place for private corporations. From 1952 to 1955, the number of private firms in Yunnan was in steep decline, and their share of provincial output value decreased from 45.6 percent in 1950 to 7.5 percent in 1955.16 Over the winter of 1955–1956, the Yongchangxiang shareholders, like those of other companies, decided that their only option was to apply for a program that allowed state investment in and joint management of their corporation (gongsi heying). On January 20, 1956, the Kunming Party Committee and the Provincial Foreign Trade Bureau (Waimaoju) accepted Yongchangxiang’s application, and the company merged its assets with fourteen other import and export firms to collectively form the Kunming Public-Private Import Export Corporation. Yan Xiecheng was appointed chairman of the board of the new company, and Yan Xiangcheng accepted the position of assistant manager. Other shareholders and employees were assigned to posts in the new company.17 During the transition to joint state-private management, the Yongchangxiang accounting books were carefully investigated, its assets and debits clarified. The old accounting system, initially borrowed from the Shanxi merchants in the Qing, guided the new state to the assets accumulated over a half-century of doing business. The assets were located across multiple provinces and countries, and the state proceeded to disarticulate Yongchangxiang’s network of businesses, which was centered on the Kunming headquarters. The state then reassembled the assets according to a new geography of power. One silk reeling plant in Sichuan, for example (jointly owned with Maoheng), became the Yunlian Silk Factory, to be managed as part of the state-run Sichuan silk industry. The other Sichuan silk reeling plant at Yibin was consolidated into a small municipal factory, and the general manager, Wang Hui, no longer subject to a corporate governance system that promoted efficiency and profit, joined the Yibin municipal bureaucracy. The tin mining and refining facilities in Gejiu, along with the staff, were integrated into a separate public-private tin mining corporation.18 In disarticulating Yongchangxiang’s businesses, the Communist state purposefully dismantled the extraordinary transprovincial networks of communication and organization that had nurtured Yongchangxiang and other firms for several generations. They were replaced by the bureaucratic management

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systems of the new government and Communist Party, which were designed for a planned economy that operated largely without markets. Like Yongchangxiang, Maoheng had its silk, cotton, and medicine trading networks disarticulated and then recombined into new hierarchies of state power. By the mid-1950s, however, Maoheng was no longer just a trade or investment corporation. According to interviews with shareholders and managers, the Maoheng general manager, Wang Zhenyu, had proposed to the shareholders in 1940 that the corporation transform itself into an industrial firm. Already involved in trading cotton goods, the firm was well aware of Yunnan’s historical need for cotton cloth. It was clear, moreover, that the new factories built by the YEC could not meet demand, so Maoheng arranged to buy twenty thousand spindles from the British, to be paid for and delivered after the war. In preparation for running an industrial plant, the firm purchased five hundred spindles from Miao Yuntai and the YEC in 1943. They then established a small test factory, which opened its doors on Kunming’s north side in August 1944.19 In the unstable postwar environment, Maoheng ownership continued to pursue its goal of developing the first private textile mill in Yunnan, but it faced pressure to alter course. As domestic politics deteriorated, some shareholders wanted to erect the factory in Rangoon or Hong Kong. In 1947, the Burmese government also sought to convince Maoheng to build in Rangoon. But the Wang brothers, especially Wang Shaoyan, were adamant, or so the story goes. They wanted their factory in Kunming, and in 1947, they chose the eastern suburbs near Jiaosanqiao as the site. In 1948, they began construction with technicians recruited from eastern China and materials imported over the Burma Road and Hanoi-Kunming railroad. The plant was still incomplete as Yunnan fell to the Communists, but the Maoheng managers persisted, and in January 1950, they opened their new factory, which they called Yun Mao.20 As the new state gained control over cotton imports and sales, Yun Mao found that it had to purchase raw cotton from China Cotton. China Cotton also handled distribution and sales of all Yun Mao products, meaning that the mill quickly became reliant on the government contract system, which allowed the state to make other inroads into the mill’s operation. The municipal party, for example, became involved with Yun Mao’s laborers, pushing management to increase wages and benefits (such as a day off on Sundays) to match the state-run mills (Yunnan and Yu Dian) while also helping management rid their workforce of the unwanted influences of secret societies.21 But the party’s involvement in labor issues was only the beginning.

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On the fateful January day in 1952 when Yang Kecheng implicated his brother in corruption, the Maoheng management was brought under suspicion too. As with Yongchangxiang, the investigations associated with the Three- and Five-Antis Movements undermined the firm, and Yun Mao’s chairman, Wang Shaoyan, would take the lead among private enterprises in applying for joint state-private management. In January 1954, Yun Mao became the province’s first modern state-private corporation, and it began to be incorporated into the planned economy. With its assets valued at over 5 million yuan (new RMB), the mill was renamed the Kunming Textile Mill. It would become a cornerstone of the Kunming economy, eventually expanding to be one of the largest industrial concerns in the province. For the time being, Wang Shaoyan was appointed chairman of the board of directors and would assume other important posts, including assistant governor of Yunnan, while the party’s representative assumed the duties of deputy chair as well as factory manager. Some of the old Maoheng managers stayed on as employees of the factory, but the state’s conquest of the corporation was complete.22 As for Yang Kecheng, after playing an important role in the state conquest of corporations, he continued to serve in provincial government positions for a number of years. He would even enjoy a turn on the national stage when Zhou Enlai summoned him to consult on China-Burma affairs. Joining him in Beijing was Yin Mingde, a native of Lianghe County, the former saopha principality of Nandian. Yin had been part of the mobile merchant culture that emerged in western Yunnan, and as a student in Beijing in the prerevolutionary period, he had joined New Tengchong, one of the progressive merchant associations concerned with rural reform in the borderlands. Much of the new China depended on the old, and as younger men, both Yin Mingde and Yang Kecheng had shared a deep interest in sovereignty and development along the Yunnan frontier. Yang Kecheng’s time in power would be short. Labeled a rightist in 1957, he found his life taking a “rough and tortuous” turn, and while his biographer does not supply the details of his being purged from power, they are not hard to imagine. It would be a long two decades until November 1979 when Yang Kecheng was exonerated and returned to positions of influence.23 Back in Xizhou, where Yang’s family had been one of the most prosperous, it was also a long two decades for the families associated, no matter how distantly, with the great trading firms. With the firms gone and the immediate families of the managers and shareholders residing in the towns of their last assignments, whether in China or abroad, the relatives back home were cut off from the flows of ideas, commodities, and

200 Epilogue

money that had transformed Xizhou into one of Yunnan’s wealthy merchant oases with good schools and the potential to access the cosmopolitan world. Like other merchant towns, Xizhou was forced into agrarian isolation by the party’s brutal economic planning for the countryside, and the surnames that had once invested in the schools, library, medical clinic, and other modern features were now castigated even as Xizhou, like many other borderlands towns, sank into a backwardness and isolation that in the past had been more imagined than real. It took the Communist government to make the discourse into a lived reality. –•– Whereas Yang Kecheng had welcomed the Communists, Fang Kesheng actively opposed them. In November 1949, as the Teng Long region was being occupied by the People’s Liberation Army (PLA), Fang Kesheng deployed his militia to the border between Mangshi and Longling to prevent the PLA’s southwestward advance. He later recalled his militia but refused to allow the PLA into Mangshi. In response, the Communist Party dispatched a propaganda agent to explain to Fang the new minority ethnicity policies that promised equality and prosperity for all. After being assured that the Tai themselves would decide their own future, Fang apparently relented and allowed the PLA to occupy Mangshi.24 The party contacted other Tai saopha elite, including Dao Baotu (Dao Jingban) of Ganyai (Yingjiang) and Gong Shou of Nandian (Lianghe), inviting them to welcome the new regime with its promise of national unity and wealth. The leaders from the saopha families were urged to meet with regional party leaders, but it soon became clear that the saophas were not being solicited for advice. When, in the spirit of open communication, Fang Kesheng had sent a telegram to China’s new rulers requesting Tai self-rule, he received no response, although he was later accused of resisting the revolution.25 For Fang Kesheng, the PLA’s occupation of western Yunnan could be understood as part of a longer history of Chinese violence. While the party spoke of peaceful liberation, the occupation was punctuated with bloodshed. In August 1950, PLA troops invaded one Tai principality without authorization, ransacked the area looking for weapons, beat people, and hung them up by ropes. One of those hoisted aloft was the saopha’s mother. While the party treated this as a serious violation of its ethnicities policy, the violence revealed deeper prejudices, and it echoed the acts of provincial troops in the 1930s, such as the time they took Dao Baotu’s mother hostage.26

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The PLA violence was part of a larger regional chaos during the civil war. Fleeing from Communist troops, several thousand Nationalist troops had crossed the Yunnan border into Burma, where General Li Mi would piece together a ragtag army to threaten the Southwest for more than a decade.27 Within the boundaries of Yunnan, many locals joined scattered resistance efforts, and in the first few months of 1950 alone, dozens were killed, injured, or captured by the PLA. The party found that small-scale anti-Communist militias were common throughout Yunnan, but the Teng Long region was considered unique because of Li Mi’s army, as well as the potential for resistance from the Tai and Kachin (Jingpo) communities.28 Teng Long thus provided the party with a conundrum. How should they deal with this diverse, strategic region? At first, the party prioritized establishing good relations with the lower classes, and its cadres organized the typical mass mobilizations in which ordinary people were taught about class exploitation and recruited as party allies against to the elite saopha families.29 The party soon found, however, that it could not overlook the Tai elite. From 1951 forward, the party therefore recruited Tai leaders, and Dao Baotu, for one, worked with the new government. He was asked to invite relatives to return from exile in Burma, and he was chosen to visit Beijing for the second annual National Day celebration in October 1951. Upon his return, Baotu was appointed county magistrate for Yingjiang County, a post he held for two years until 1953, when he chaired the Preparatory Committee for the establishment of the Dehong Autonomous Region (Dehong zizhi qu).30 As the autonomous government was being planned, however, party insiders voiced concerns about the Tai elite. It was reported that the saophas were politically savvy, seeking to divide the party by playing lower-level cadres against their superiors. It was feared, moreover, that the party had too few members to control saopha power, particularly because non-Han party members, who would be pivotal in Tai and Kachin communities, made up only 17 percent of the cadres in some locations, and there were serious doubts about their effectiveness.31 The one area of certainty for the party leadership was that recruiting Han migrants to lead local development efforts would be paramount, because, it was believed, they possessed more advanced cultural levels.32 As the party began to establish its nominally revolutionary government in western Yunnan’s Tai communities, the continuities with the past were striking. It was accepted that these spaces and peoples were mired in the

202 Epilogue

past, that minority communities did not yet share in the same modernity as the Han. These ideas were reinforced by the work of scholars such as Jiang Yingliang. Published in 1950, just as the PLA established itself in western Yunnan, Jiang’s The Economic Life of the Baiyi (“Baiyi” being a pejorative for the Tai) argued that the Teng Long land systems were “primitive tribal collectives.” Like those surveying Yunnan in the 1940s and those surveying Kham in the 1950s, Jiang blamed this backwardness on the indigenous elite. While it was certainly fair to discuss the inequalities in Tai society, Jiang made no effort to reveal how the saophas were connected to transnational ideas about representational governance or economic development.33 Instead, Jiang caricatured them, essentially concealing what he knew to be true: in his own experiences and photographs of Tai life, as in those of other ethnographers, there was ample evidence of cosmopolitan lifestyles. These were not a “backward” people (figure 15). Instead of a nuanced, accurate story of borderland life, the party reproduced the earlier representations of western Yunnan and other non-Han regions of the Southwest as the backward, vulnerable periphery, thereby contributing to policies of discrimination. In Teng Long, soon to be reorganized as the Dehong Autonomous Region, the government encouraged Han migration, noting that Han could help Dehong develop faster.34 Such a policy was replicated farther to the south, where Han farmers were considered culturally more capable of work at state rubber farms, while the allegedly less modern Tai farmers were organized into collectives to produce grain. As Janet Sturgeon has argued, “Populations were divided into advanced Han and backward minorities, with each group linked to particular land uses—a spatial manifestation of social hierarchy, with Han people and spaces equated with the ‘modern,’ and minority peoples and spaces designated as ‘backward.’ ”35 As this book has demonstrated, these ideas were not new in the 1950s. They had emerged from late Qing and Republican thinking, which then became part of the assemblage that would undergird trends of disempowered development throughout the People’s Republic. Based on the findings in this book and the work by scholars of the post-1949 period, it is important to entertain the idea that the reason that many of China’s minorities live with higher rates of poverty and lower average incomes per capita is not simply a reflection of geography,36 but an outcome shaped by critical historical actions, especially by the Chinese state. In the late Qing and Republican periods, major changes in merchant organization allowed Han, Hui, and Minjia firms to gain increasing power over

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FIGURE 15.   Zhefang’s

lord of the sky (saopha) Duo Yingpei (center), with researchers from the Institute of History and Philology, April 1935. Photos by institute researchers and others, including Jiang Yingliang, recorded the Tai elite’s lifestyles, including their Western suits, love of cars, and international connections, but their ethnographic analysis often omitted this information. S ou rc e : Image courtesy of the Institute of History and Philology, Academia Sinica. Reprinted with permission.

local economies throughout the Southwest. The trend was not absolute of course. In Kham, Khampa firms, some tied to the monasteries, continued to be influential, and in the Tai communities, the saopha families tried a number of development schemes. Chinese state builders, however, ignored these inconvenient truths and often represented these communities as lacking capable modern leadership, and therefore desperate for outside help.

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From the late Qing forward, several generations of statesmen argued for using state institutions to develop and exploit local borderlands resources, and, in the People’s Republic, when the state gained the capacity for fundamental transformation, these older ways of thinking continued to structure the institutions of development, whether they were the state farms in Yunnan that employed Han, the Production and Construction Corps that acted as a Han and party colonizing force in Xinjiang, or, more recently in Yunnan, the institutions used to develop minority regions for tourism.37 While there are certainly exceptions to these larger trends, the exceptions reveal the long-term and deepseated patterns of inequality that have structured disempowered development since the beginning of China’s modern era. In the twenty-first century, as the party continues to denigrate non-Han indigenous leaders such as the Dalai Lama and non-Han indigenous cultures such as Uyghur Islam, we must understand how it got to this point, for it could have been different. On July 23, 1953, Dao Baotu and Gong Shou celebrated the establishment of the Dehong Autonomous Region. Baotu was the new chair of the regional government, and Gong Shou was one of the new vice chairs. Descendants of two saopha clans, the men had lived extraordinary lives in which they had inherited the legacy of the Revolutionary Alliance from Dao Anren, fought the Japanese, watched relatives in the Shan States seemingly gain selfdetermination as the British Empire retreated, and experienced the tragedy and uncertainty of the most recent six years, when their ideas for autonomy and selfgovernance were rejected. In 1953, however, there was a chance for a new start. The Tai were promised “autonomy” in an autonomous region to be shared with the Kachin (Jingpo). But this autonomy turned out to be a particularly vicious euphemism that hardly resembled the ideas once discussed by Dao Baotu, Gong Shou, Feng Kesheng, and the other elite Tai. There was not a hint of the local economic empowerment envisioned by Fang Kesheng’s Ideas.38 In April 1954, as the region was subjected to land reform, Baotu took the lead in abolishing the land systems that had supported his clan for centuries. Next came the eradication of the markets, trade, and sidelines that had supplemented incomes for generations; they would be taken over or prohibited by the state. Instead of the local light industries and diversified economy imagined by Fang Kesheng, the new government simplified local economic systems by eradicating most occupations, leaving farming as the only option open to most Tai.39 In addition, the state encouraged Han migrants to open those seemingly unused lands that had been deemed neglected under the saophas, and the demographics

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of the region began to shift.40 It is hard not to see these changes as a process of disempowerment in which the Tai were made to serve the state as grain producers while local resources came to be controlled by outsiders. In the years after 1957, when, by its own admission, the party mistakenly began to force minority ethnic groups to assimilate to Han ways,41 the old saopha families were among the many who suffered. In Longchuan, the former nobility were arrested and tortured during the Cultural Revolution (1966– 1976), the former saopha dying just a few days into this ordeal.42 Dao Baotu was also attacked, enduring struggle sessions and torture before dying in December 1966.43 Like many others from the region, Fang Kesheng escaped the Communist occupation, going into exile first in Burma and then Taiwan, leaving behind a region where, despite all of its talk about revolution and change, the party reinforced old patterns of inequality. Before the revolution, it had been Han firms and Han shopkeepers who controlled much of the trade in the Tai communities,44 as they did in Kham communities as well. This was the commercial structure that Fang Kesheng had sought to transform. And it was transformed, in that the state and its institutions first conquered the private corporations and then used state control of trade and markets to conquer local communities. As Yongchangxiang and the other Yunnan trading firms were disarticulated and recombined under disparate state corporations, the state used its growing power to bring borderlands communities under greater control. The key to this process was to gain control of private firms—as the Yunnan provincial government had done with Yongchangxiang—and then take over their commercial networks while undermining indigenous hierarchies of political power as had occurred in the Tai domains. In 1952 in Kham, for example, state-run trading firms were introduced into Dartsedo (Kangding), while private firms were still operating, as outlined in chapter 4. By 1954, however, private firms began closing their doors, and by 1957, when private firms had been brought under state control as in Yunnan, the county commercial bureau controlled Kham’s networks of trade in cloth, tea, and medicines. By monopolizing the production, transport, and sales of tea,45 the state commercial bureau was able to then come to control all sales to and purchase from local markets, effectively gaining extraordinary control over people like Peldengyel, who relied on sidelines to survive. The state commercial bureaus, like the shops and firms before them, were dominated by Han, meaning that the ethnic division of power in the economic sphere had been recreated by the new government.46

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Whereas Peldengyel and his neighbors relied on sidelines to make ends meet, the state gradually used its new power over commerce to change the nature of sideline production. Those who hunted musk deer or gathered medicinal plants were enrolled in the rural cooperatives, meaning that the local state and party were given jurisdiction over their livelihoods. These changes made for a chaotic process, and what little economic autonomy families had originally exercised was curtailed even further. Finally, during the Cultural Revolution, the sidelines were deemed to be “tails of capitalism” and were eradicated, meaning people could no longer supplement their farming livelihoods.47 In the end, then, the networks of commercial power that the merchant corporations had created to reach into Khampa communities were co-opted by the state and then used to bring Khampa families under greater state control. The story of Communist state power in the borderlands therefore is one of both private and state corporations. The story starts not after 1949 but in the 1870s, when Chinese merchant corporations began transforming borderlands business practices, thereby bringing indigenous communities into more intense networks of regional and global trade. At the same time, Qing statesmen, following Zuo Zongtang’s lead, began to reconceive power and legitimacy in the peripheries and, starting with Liu Changyou and Cen Yuying, to link that power and legitimacy to control over mining and economic development, which they sought to achieve by building new public-private corporations. Over the long term, then, both the private and state sectors turned to corporate organizations to provide access to resources and communities, a process that produced the disempowered development that has reverberated throughout China’s vast borderlands. By focusing on corporations, this book provides new understandings of the structures of power in China’s modern borderlands, and by applying the methodologies of borderlands history to the story of modern Chinese development, it challenges the assumption that innovations always moved from east to west, from the coastal cities such as Shanghai to the isolated inlands. Instead, the book reveals how important new concepts, including the use of corporate institutions to transform allegedly backward rural peoples, were forged in the pre-Communist borderlands, sometimes in advance of developments elsewhere in China, including at the national level. And those corporate institutions would prove to be remarkably important not only for building the Maoist state, but also, perhaps, foreshadowing the policies used to reform China in the years after 1979.

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–•– Like the state-run, entrepreneurial corporations that he believed in, Miao Yuntai would spend several decades in exile from mainland China. In a last, desperate act before fleeing to the United States, Miao sought to reverse some of the wartime developments that he had helped create. In particular, he wanted to disentangle his beloved corporations from the bureaucratic state once and for all. To do this, he founded the Yunnan People’s Enterprise Stock Company, Ltd., which was to be a massive holding company controlling all of the corporations run by the YEC and other provincial departments. The goal of the People’s Enterprise was to continue the economic development work that would benefit Yunnan’s citizens, and although Miao initially had difficulty in gaining Nanjing’s approval for such an unbelievable scheme, he used his central government contacts to have the new company approved.48 As a corporation, the People’s Enterprise had a recognizable governing structure that reflected Miao’s emphasis on shareholder power and management autonomy. The highest authority of the corporation was to be the annual shareholders’ meeting. But the most extraordinary thing about the firm was that the shareholders were to be the Yunnanese people themselves, with a single share assigned to every household.49 Miao later claimed that People’s Enterprise was designed to give Yunnanese control over Yunnan’s resources and development. If so, then this was to be an extraordinary experiment in empowered development. Miao also argued that the corporation was designed to encourage local elections in which each township’s voters would nominate a candidate to run for the position of regional representative to the annual shareholder’s meeting. Each township’s candidate would run against others in a county- or citywide election.50 While Miao’s goal may have indeed been to give Yunnanese a say in their own development, in the end, the People’s Enterprise and its corporations were all absorbed by the new government in 1950, and Miao’s mission to separate the entrepreneurial from the bureaucratic would not be revived for thirty years. In the meantime, the NRC management model was adapted by the new Communist government, and Yunnan’s innovative corporations were reorganized to answer to the bureaucrats who ran Communist China’s planned economy. In 1979, however, as Deng Xiaoping was encouraging the first experimental steps back toward a market-oriented economy, Miao Yuntai renounced his American citizenship and returned to China. He arrived at a momentous time.

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In these early days of reform, Deng recruited one of Shanghai’s prerevolutionary capitalists, Rong Yiren, to create a new type of corporation free of state bureaucratic control and therefore unencumbered in its ability to advance China’s economic development. This company was China International Trust and Investment Corporation (Zhongguo guoji touzi xintuo gongsi), CITIC for short, and Miao Yuntai was invited to sit on the board of directors. For Miao, the mission statement of CITIC must have sounded hauntingly familiar. According to Rong Yiren, the plan was to serve the needs of China’s modernization by introducing foreign capital, technology and equipment. [CITIC] is not an administrative organ but a business entity directly accountable to the State Council. Since its inception, CITIC has employed those methods of management and business operations used in capitalist countries which are useful to China’s socialist construction. Integrating finance, production, trade and services, its business scope is broad and its modes of operation flexible.51

Knowing that Miao Yuntai sat on the board of CITIC, it is difficult to read Rong’s words without recalling Miao’s goals to serve Yunnan’s industrialization by introducing innovative corporate management based in part on American influences and integrating industry and agriculture with the backing of a strong financial institution. The idea that CITIC was not an administrative organ but a business entity echoed Miao’s insistence on separating his entrepreneurial enterprises from the administrative functions of government. More than forty years earlier, Miao Yuntai had sought to build innovative institutions designed to thwart the Chinese tendency toward state bureaucratic control. To do so, he had sought autonomy for the YEC and his corporations by emphasizing corporate governance that empowered managers to manage. And this was precisely what Rong sought as well: he received from Deng Xiaoping the authorization to make all decisions about CITIC’s business affairs.52 Despite the echoes of the past, there were telling differences between Rong’s CITIC and Miao’s YEC. Rong centralized authority in CITIC’s headquarters even as the firm developed a broad range of business interests and investments. Miao, meanwhile, had refused to centralize decision making in the YEC, trusting that he and the other general managers would make better decisions. It was only a decade later that Deng Xiaoping and his successors would come to the same conclusion and begin to experiment with giving significant decisionmaking power to factory managers. And it would be another ten to twenty

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years before the Company Law (1993–1994) and the State-owned Assets Supervision and Administration Commission (2003) were implemented in order to reproduce conditions of sound corporate governance, efficiency, and profit motive. Did Miao, who died in 1988, have any influence over these developments? His thinking certainly is mirrored in these developments, but any accurate answer awaits further research. What can be concluded here is that Miao and the Yunnan provincial government pioneered a new future for China and its borderlands by developing a rationale and method for making the state the most important arbiter of development in the regions that were deemed so threatening because they were so diverse. In the process, they promoted the narrative of these spaces as backward, dangerous, and perpetually in need of outside help, a need that the state would magnanimously meet with corporations designed to save, or perhaps conquer, the borderlands and its communities.

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Appendix Tin Production and Silk Exports

YEARS

CHANGES IN TIN PRODUCTION

NOTES

1900–1910

Production increases from 2,900 long tons in 1900 to 6,000 long tons in 1910.

Tin is exported to Hong Kong via Haiphong. Export by rail begins in 1910.

1911–1920

Production increases from 6,000 long tons in 1910 to 10,900 long tons in 1920.

The largest production year was 1917 (11,070 long tons).

1921–1930

Production declines to a range of 5,869 long tons (1927) to 8,328 long tons (1923).

1931–1936

Production increases from 7,198 long tons in 1931 to 9,996 long tons in 1936.

TABLE 1.

By early 1930s, tin is shipped directly to London and New York via Haiphong, earning larger profits for the provincial tin company.

Tin Production in Gejiu, Yunnan, 1900–1936.

S ou rc e: J. C. S Hall, The Yunnan Provincial Faction, 1927–1937, 153.

211

212 Appendix

YEARS

VOLUME OF SILK IN KILOGRAMS (MAUNDS)

NOTES

1899–1902

138,202 (3,703)

Three-year totals given in Burma, Land Records reports

1911–1914

215,159 (5,765)

1917–1920

647,343 (17,345)

1936

439,500 (4,395 quintals)

1937

379,900 (3,799 quintals)

Single-year totals given in Chinese Maritime Customs reports

Sample of Raw Silk Export Volumes to Burma from Western China (Sichuan Silk Shipped via Yunnan), 1899–1937. TABLE 2.

Sou rc e s : Figures for 1900 to 1920 from IOR/V/24/4256 and 4257 Burma, Land Records Department, “Report on the Transfrontier Trade of Burma during the Year 1901–1902 and the triennial period ending 31st March 1902,” 10–11; “Report on the Transfrontier Trade of Burma during the Year 1913–1914 and the Triennial Period Ending 31st March 1914,” 10–11; “Report on the Transfrontier Trade of Burma during the Year 1919– 1920 and the Triennial Period Ending 31st March 1920,” 14–15. Conversions: Figures converted from maunds (mds.), which were standardized at 82.28 pounds or 37.32 kilograms per maund. The Imperial Gazetteer of India: The Indian Empire, new ed. (Historical), 2:vii. Figures for 1936 and 1937 from “Extract from the Report of the Chinese Maritime Customs for the Year 1937,” 480. Conversions: Figures converted from quintals (gongdan), which were standardized at 100 kilograms per quintal. The Trade of China, 1937: Introductory Survey with Tables for Revenue, Value, Treasure and Shipping, iv.

Notes

Introduction 1.  Fang Kesheng, Jianshe Teng Long bianqu ge tusi de yijianshu. 2.  The Tai of western Yunnan call themselves Tai Le (IPA with superscript tone identifiers: Tai2L 6), which should not be confused with the Tai Lü of southern Yunnan. In this book, the Tai Le, who were subject to China, are referred to simply as Tai, while the Tai subject to colonial Burma are often referred to as Tai Shan. I use the common term saopha to refer to the rulers of Tai principalities in both Burma and China, although a more accurate rendering in Tai Le would be tsau faa (tsau4 faa5). For a short introduction to the Tai Le, see Yos Santasombat, Lak Chang: A Reconstruction of Tai Identity in Daikong, 1–11; note that the author uses the term Tai Yai for the Tai Le. For Tai Le as an autonym and for the proper rendering of saopha in Tai Le, see Luo Yongxian, comp., A Dictionary of Dehong, Southwest China, xi–xii, 199. 3.  For example, “Dian Chuan Kang Baiyi yunniang duli chou zu Nanchao lianbang hezhong guo.” 4.  For the role of surveys in creating the idea of backward minorities, see Tong Lam, A Passion for Facts: Social Surveys and the Construction of the Chinese NationState, 1900–1949, 10–11, 133–139. 5.  Roger V. Des Forges was the first to write on Dao in English. See Hsi-liang and the Chinese National Revolution, esp. 82, 85, 115. 6.  The concept of disempowerment is from Andrew Martin Fischer, The Disempowered Development of Tibet in China: A Study in the Economics of Marginalization. For creation of spatial and ethnic inequalities in Xinjiang from the 1940s to the 1990s, see Judd C. Kinzley, Natural Resources and the New Frontier: Constructing Modern China’s Borderlands, 181–182. For Maoist policies and their adverse impact on minority communities, see Bjorn Gustafsson, “Ethnic Disparities in Economic Well-Being in 213

214 Notes to Introduction

China,” 344. For Communist Party labeling of minorities as less capable, see Janet C. Sturgeon, “Governing Minorities and Development in Xishuangbanna, China: Akha and Dai Rubber Farmers as Entrepreneurs,” 318–328. 7.  Gustafsson provides an outstanding, balanced overview in “Ethnic Disparities,” 348–349, 352–355, 360–362. Other information in this paragraph is from James Leibold, “Interethnic Conflict in the PRC: Xinjiang and Tibet as Exceptions?” 223– 250; Susan K. McCarthy, Communist Multiculturalism: Ethnic Revival in Southwest China, 83–88, 104; John A. Donaldson, “Tourism, Development and Poverty Reduction in Guizhou and Yunnan,” 333–351. 8.  Kinzley, Natural Resources and the New Frontier, 15–16. 9.  Gustafsson, “Ethnic Disparities,” 344, 347. 10.  Paul Krugman, “Where in the World Is the ‘New Economic Geography’?” 52, 58; Andrew D. Mellinger, Jeffrey D. Sachs, and John L. Gallup, “Climate, Coastal Proximity, and Development,” 169–194. 11.  Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space; Neil Smith, Uneven Development: Nature, Capital, and the Production of Space. 12.  Kinzley, Natural Resources and the New Frontier, 16. 13.  Emily T. Yeh, Taming Tibet: Landscape Transformation and the Gift of Chinese Development, 6, 21, and esp. chap. 3. 14.  Fischer, The Disempowered Development of Tibet, chap. 1, esp. p. 24. 15.  For a thoughtful review, see Elena Barabantseva, “The Politics of Everyday Ethnicity in China,” 355–361. For the impact of policies in Yunnan but also resistance against definition by the state, see McCarthy, Communist Multiculturalism, 9–10, 81. 16.  Richard White, The Roots of Dependency: Subsistence, Environment, and Social Change among the Choctaws, Pawnees, and Navajos, 315–321. 17.  Stephen Cornell and Joseph P. Kalt, “Pathways from Poverty: Development and Institution-Building on American Indian Reservations,” 24. 18.  Nicholas Becquelin “Staged Development in Xinjiang,” 44–64. 19.  Andrew Batson, “Mapping China: Which Provinces Are Most Dominated by State-Owned Firms?” 20.  Donaldson, “Tourism, Development and Poverty Reduction,” 333–351. 21.  Chih-yu Shih, Autonomy, Ethnicity, and Poverty in Southwestern China: The State Turned Upside Down, 2–3. 22.  For pioneering works in the field, see James A. Millward, Beyond the Pass: Economy, Ethnicity, and Empire in Qing Central Asia, 1759–1864; Peter C. Perdue, China Marches West: The Qing Conquest of Central Eurasia, esp. chap. 11 and p. 397. For a more complete review of merchants and borderlands, see C. Patterson Giersch, “Commerce and Empire in the Borderlands: How Do Merchants and Trade Fit into Qing Frontier History?” 361–383. 23.  Yingcong Dai, “The Qing State, Merchants, and the Military Labor Force in



Notes to Introduction 215

the Jinchuan Campaigns,” 36, 62–63; see also Dai, The Sichuan Frontier and Tibet: Imperial Strategy in the Early Qing, 179, 184–185. 24.  For an outstanding summary of the field of translocal history, see Melissa Macauley, “Entangled States: The Translocal Repercussions of Rural Pacification in China, 1869–1873,” 756–757. For the inspiring challenge to national and area studies boundaries in Asia, see Willem van Schendel, “Geographies of Knowing, Geographies of Ignorance: Jumping Scale in Southeast Asia,” 647–668. 25.  Note that my definition resembles broadly accepted definitions. James T. Scott, “Corporations,” 417–420; Sara Hsu, “Corporatization.” 26.  On company law, including the Nationalist government’s excluding its own enterprises, see William C. Kirby, “China Unincorporated: Company Law and Business Enterprise in Twentieth-Century China,” 43–63, esp. p. 52. 27.  I have been deeply influenced by the work of Madeleine Zelin, including “The Firm in Early Modern China,” 623–637 and The Merchants of Zigong: Industrial Entrepreneurship in Early Modern China. Other influential work: Kenneth Pomeranz, “ ‘Traditional’ Chinese Business Forms Revisited: Family, Firm, and Financing in the Yutang Company of Jining, 1779–1956,” 1–38; David Faure, “The Lineage as Business Company: Patronage versus Law in the Development of Chinese Business.” 28.  For scholarship that essentializes the Chinese business firm, see, for example, Peter L. Berger, “An East Asian Development Model?” 3–11; S. Gordon Redding, The Spirit of Chinese Capitalism; Murray Weidenbaum and Samuel Hughes, The Bamboo Network: How Expatriate Chinese Entrepreneurs Are Creating a New Economic Superpower in Asia. 29.  Stephanie Decker, Matthias Kipping, and R. Daniel Wadhwani, “New Business Histories! Plurality in Business History Research Methods,” 33. 30.  Elisabeth Köll, From Cotton Mill to Business Empire: The Emergence of Regional Enterprises in Modern China. 31.  Sven Beckert and Julia B. Rosenbaum, eds., American Bourgeoisie: Distinction and Identity in the Nineteenth Century; Wen-hsin Yeh, Shanghai Splendor: Economic Sentiments and the Making of Modern China, 1843–1949, 1–3, chap. 1. 32.  Patrick Joyce, The State of Freedom: A Social History of the British State since 1800, 19. 33.  This is the deeply historical argument of Morris L. Bian’s excellent The Making of the State Enterprise System in Modern China: The Dynamics of Institutional Change; see esp. the argument summary, 213–214. 34.  Kinzley, Natural Resources and the New Frontier, 2–3. I find Kinzley’s argument particularly compelling because I came to a similar conclusion before reading his fine book. I chose Joyce’s concept of “assemblage” to convey a sense of assembling something from disparate, and perhaps not altogether compatible, parts, an apt metaphor for the modern Chinese party-state. “Mish-mash” serves the same purpose.

216 Notes to Introduction

35.  David J. Weber, “Turner, the Boltonians, and the Borderlands,” 73, emphasis added. 36.  Frederick Jackson Turner, “The Significance of the Frontier in American History,” 32. 37.  Pekka Hämäläinen and Samuel Truett, “On Borderlands,” 338. One of the finest examples of challenges to Han-centric narratives is Perdue, China Marches West. 38.  Richard White, “The Nationalization of Nature,” 980. 39.  On new approaches to business history and the history of capitalism, see Decker, Kipping, and Wadhwani, “New Business Histories!” 30–40. For Hyman’s points, see Louis Hyman, “Why Write the History of Capitalism?” 40.  Rian Thum, “Comments” part of a ChinaFile conversation: “How Should the World Respond to Intensifying Repression in Xinjiang?” 41.  For English-language accounts of this complex history, see Charles Backus, The Nan-chao Kingdom and T’ang China’s Southwestern Frontier; Bin Yang, Between Winds and Clouds: The Making of Yunnan, chap. 3. 42.  The best study of Ming violence against indigenous regimes is John E. Herman, Amid the Clouds and Mist: China’s Colonization of Guizhou, 1200–1700; for Ming and Qing interaction with Tai-speaking people, see C. Patterson Giersch, Asian Borderlands: The Transformation of Qing China’s Yunnan Frontier, 34–36, chaps. 2, 3. 43.  For cataloging, see Laura Hostetler, Qing Colonial Enterprise: Ethnography and Cartography in Early Modern China, and Emma Jinhua Teng, Taiwan’s Imagined Geography: Chinese Colonial Travel Writing and Pictures. For one discussion of flexible rulership in response to Qing understandings of peoples, see C. Patterson Giersch, “From Subjects to Han: The Rise of Han as Identity in Nineteenth-Century Southwest China.” 44.  Yunnan tongzhigao (1835), vols. 182–187; for the rise of Han identity in the Southwest, see Giersch, “From Subjects to Han.” 45.  Thomas S. Mullaney, Coming to Terms with the Nation: Ethnic Classification in Modern China, 47. 46.  Mullaney, Coming to Terms with the Nation, chaps. 1, 2. 47.  Paragraph based on Sutton, Provincial Militarism and the Chinese Republic: The Yunnan Army, 1905–1925, 14, 21–22, 45–47. 48.  Sutton, Provincial Militarism and the Chinese Republic, 127–138, 165–169. For the controversy over the Tang’s role in the second revolution, see 184–191, as well as the authoritative interpretation summarized in Ernest P. Young, “Politics in the Aftermath of Revolution: The Era of Yuan Shih-k’ai, 1912–16,” 251–255. 49.  Sutton, Provincial Militarism and the Chinese Republic, 260–261; J. C. S. Hall, The Yunnan Provincial Faction, 1927–1937, 4–5 and chap. 1. 50.  Christopher J. Napier, “Historiography,” 37. 51.  Dean Neu and Cameron Graham, “The Birth of a Nation: Accounting and Canada’s First Nations, 1860–1900,” esp. 49–51. Other historians have noted how



Notes to Introduction and Chapter 1 217

accounting was used to control expanding business firms, but they treat bookkeeping as a rational technology without examining how it transformed relationships and behaviors. See, for example, Wellington K. K. Chan, “The Organizational Structure of the Traditional Chinese Firm and Its Modern Reform,” 218–235. 52.  An influential articulation of the impact of migration is in Adam McKeown, Chinese Migrant Networks and Cultural Change: Peru, Chicago, Hawaii, 1900–1936, 279–280. 53.  Yi Li, Chinese in Colonial Burma: A Migrant Community in a Multiethnic State, 8–9, 24. 54.  The English-language literature on Zhao Erfeng and Kham is expansive; for two of the many good studies, see Elliot Sperling, “The Chinese Venture in K’am, 1904–1911, and the Role of Chao Erh-feng,” 10–36; and Scott Relyea, “Yokes of Gold and Threads of Silk: Sino-Tibetan Competition for Authority in Early Twentieth-Century Kham,” 996–1000. 55.  Some of the foundational works include Albert Feuerwerker, China’s Early Industrialization: Sheng Hsuan-Huai (1844–1916) and Mandarin Enterprise; and Wellington K. K. Chan, Merchants, Mandarins, and Modern Enterprise in Late Ch’ing China. For an outstanding review of the field’s recent accomplishments, see Morris Bian, “Interpreting Enterprise, State, and Society: A Critical Review of the Literature in Modern Chinese Business History, 1978–2008,” 423–462. 56.  Shi Yun’s dissertation is the best study of Miao and his impact on finance. Shi Yun, “Fu Dian zhi meng: Minguo Yunnan jinrong fazhan de jingyan yu jiaoxun—yi Fudian yinhang, Fudian xin yinhang wei zhongxin.” In English, Hall also provides a strong study of Miao within the context of provincial governance during the 1930s. Hall, The Yunnan Provincial Faction. 57.  Bian, The Making of the State Enterprise System, 77–92. Chapter 1 1.  I am introducing the idea of commercial accounting as a technology that Yunnanese used to centralize and control their expanding firms, even when firm branches were located hundreds of miles from the headquarters. For administrative accounting as a technology for transforming new territory into governable space, see Dean Neu and Cameron Graham, “Birth of a Nation: Accounting and Canada’s First Nations, 1860–1900,” esp. 49–51. Historians have noted how Chinese business accounting was used to control expanding firms, but they treat bookkeeping simply as a rational technology without evaluating how it transformed behaviors. See, for example, Wellington K. K. Chan, “The Organizational Structure of the Traditional Chinese Firm and Its Modern Reform,” 218–235. 2.  Yang Kecheng, “Yongchangxiang jianshi,” 54–55. 3.  Yang Kecheng. “Yongchangxiang jianshi,” 47–51.

218 Notes to Chapter 1

4.  Yang Kecheng, “Yongchangxiang jianshi,” 50–52, 103; Chen Yanbin, Dali Baizu Xizhou shangbang yanjiu, 14, 19–20; Liang Guanfan, “Xiaguan gongshangye diaochao baogao,” 136–141. The 1951 estimate of Yongchangxiang assets was, as Yang Kecheng points out, done in turbulent times and under a new regime that had recently fixed commodity prices. Thus, the estimates of Yongchangxiang assets range from Yang’s more conservative one to Liang’s estimate of over 324 billion renminbi, which is repeated by Chen. 5.  Lu Ren, Yunnan dui wai jiaotong shi, 60–63, 136–142, 240. 6.  For good recent discussions of Yunnan trade, see Bin Yang, Between Winds and Clouds: The Making of Yunnan, 37–43, 197–208; John E. Herman, Amidst the Clouds and Mist: China’s Colonization of Guizhou, 1200–1700, esp. 10, 14, 79, 139–141. For information on the state role, see Li Zhongqing (James Z. Lee), Zhongguo xinan bianjiang de shehui jingji, 260–265. For the classic studies on the tea-horse exchange and the Sichuan salt industry, see Paul J. Smith, Taxing Heaven’s Storehouse: Horses, Bureaucrats, and the Destruction of the Sichuan Tea Industry, 1074–1224; Richard Von Glahn, The Country of Streams and Grottoes: Expansion, Settlement, and the Civilizing of the Sichuan Frontier in Song Times. 7.  Laichen Sun, “Shan Gems, Chinese Silver, and the Rise of Shan Principalities in Modern Northern Myanmar, c. 1450–1526,” 9–14. 8.  Timothy Brook, “The Merchant Network in Sixteenth Century China: A Discussion and Translation of Zhang Han’s ‘On Merchants,’ ” 203. 9.  Li Zhongqing, Zhongguo xinan bianjiang, 86–87. 10.  Li Zhongqing, Zhongguo xinan bianjiang, 244–55. 11.  Li Zhongqing, Zhongguo xinan bianjiang, 296, 298–299. 12.  Yingcong Dai, “Yingyung Shengxi: Military Entrepreneurship in the High Qing Period, 1700–1800,” 17–19, including table 2. 13.  Nanny Kim, “Long Distance Transport across Yunnan: Energy, Efficiency and Environment,” appendix 3, pp. 24–27. 14.  C. Patterson Giersch, “Cotton, Copper, and Caravans: Trade and the Transformation of Southwest China,” 48–49. 15.  Li Jidong, “Heshun qiaoxiang shanghao lueshu,” 214. 16.  For the low number of shops, see Yang Guocai, “Zhongguo Yunnan Baizu shangban de lunli daode yanjiu,” 35; for lending institutions, see Luo Qun, Jindai Yunnan shangren yu shangren ziben, 119–125. 17.  Yin Wenhe, “ ‘Sancheng hao’—Yunnan zui gulao di Huaqiao shanghao,” 15–18. 18.  Luo Qun, Jindai Yunnan shangren, 39–41. For more on Sanyuan hao, see Su Songlin, “Dali Majiuyi ‘Sanyuan hao’ de xingshuai qingkuang,” 253–258. To the best of my knowledge, it was Yin Wenhe who did the work to date Sancheng hao to the Daoguang period. He found that Heshun’s Zhongtian Temple has a plaque dating to Daoguang 21 (1841) the plaque was presented by Sancheng hao’s Li Mao, Li Maolin,



Notes to Chapter 1 219

and Lin Zixin. See Yin Wenhe, “Sancheng hao,” 15–18. 19.  C. Patterson Giersch, Asian Borderlands: The Transformation of Qing China’s Yunnan Frontier, 138–139. 20.  Yin Wenhe, “Sancheng hao,” 15–18; Li Jidong, “Heshun qiaoxiang shanghao lueshu,” 214. 21.  Giersch, Asian Borderlands, 183. 22.  IOR/L/PS/7/8, no. 59 of 1876, Government of India, Foreign Department, Political, Letter to the Secretary of State for India, March 10, 1876, enclosure 1. Correspondence of 1862–1863 on the subject of Yunnan Opium. 23.  IOR/L/PS/7/8, Bhamo Diaries, January 1876 and February 1876 in no. 93 of 1876, Government of India, Foreign Department, Political, Letter to the Secretary of state for India, April 21, 1876. 24.  IOR/L/PS/7/16, no. 158 of 1877, September 3, 1877, Government of India, Foreign Department, Political, Letter with enclosures to Marquis of Salisbury, Secretary of State for India. Enclosures: no. 192-50P, Rangoon, July 12, 1877, from Major C. W. Street to T. H. Thorton; copy of no. 24-9, June 25, 1877. From Colonel H. A. Browne to Major C. W. Street. 25.  IOR/L/PS/7/16, Bhamo Diary, from September 5 to October 5, 1877, in no. 204 of 1877, Government of India, Foreign Department, Political. Letter to Secretary of state for India, November 30, 1877. 26.  IOR/L/PS/7/16, Bhamo Diary, October–November 4, in no. 225 of 1877, Government of India, Foreign Department, Political, Letter to Secretary of State for India, December 21, 1877. 27.  FO 228 1952, correspondence to and from Tengyue. 28.  Madeleine Zelin, “The Firm in Early Modern China,” 623–637; Zelin, The Merchants of Zigong: Industrial Entrepreneurship in Early Modern China; Kenneth Pomeranz, “ ‘Traditional’ Chinese Business Forms Revisited: Family, Firm, and Financing in the Yutang Company of Jining, 1779–1956,” 1–38; Chan, “Organizational Structure”; David Faure, “The Lineage as Business Company: Patronage versus Law in the Development of Chinese Business.” 29.  Zelin, “The Firm,” 633; Zelin, “Eastern Sichuan Coal Mines in the Late Qing,” 110–115. For scholarship that essentializes the Chinese business firm in the past and present, see Peter L. Berger, “An East Asian Development Model?” 3–11; S. Gordon Redding, The Spirit of Chinese Capitalism; Murray Weidenbaum and Samuel Hughes, The Bamboo Network: How Expatriate Chinese Entrepreneurs Are Creating a New Economic Superpower in Asia; Joel Kotkin, “Inside the Sinosphere.” 30.  Shi Cilu, “Fuchunheng de xingqi fazhan ji qi moluo,” 1–27. 31.  Li Jingtian, “Yongmaohe shanghao jingying Miandian maoyi jianshi,” 66–67. 32.  Twenty-three shareholders were recorded for 1938–1939. See the Maoheng general ledger for 1938 and 1939, YPA 132-4-10. There were thirty-seven shareholders

220 Notes to Chapter 1

by 1947. See the records of Maoheng investor expenses, YPA 132-1-10, pp. 1–2. For Maoheng investments by the late 1940s, see YPA 132-1-10, pp. 4–10 (Yunnan yunshu gongsi gudong mingbu) and YPA 132-1-10, pp. 11–14 (Touzi gukuan). 33.  Yang Kecheng, “Yongchangxiang jianshi,” 50. Yang Kecheng was born into the Yan family, but when he was eight his surname was changed to Yang in order to be able to provide sacrifices to Yan Zizhen’s biological father, surnamed Yang. Yang Kecheng, “Yongchangxiang jianshi,” 48. 34.  Zelin, Merchants of Zigong, 84, 87. 35.  YPA 132-4-91 (Yunnan Yongchangxiang heji yu’e biao). 36.  Yang Kecheng, “Yongchangxiang jianshi,” 56–57. 37.  Yang Kecheng, “Yongchangxiang jianshi,” 57–58; Chen Yanbin, Dali Baizu Xizhou shangbang, 31–33. 38.  Chen Yanbin, Dali Baizu Xizhou shangbang, 3–4, 8–9, 15, 132–133. 39.  Zhou Zhisheng, Shangren yu jindai Zhongguo Xinan bianjiang shehui: Yi Dian xibei wei zhongxin, 24–36, 62–64. 40.  The best treatments, from opposing points of view, are Beth Ellen Notar, “Wild Histories: Popular Culture, Place and the Past in Southwest China,” 61–74, and Liang Yongjia, “The ‘Ethnic Error’ in Under the Ancestors’ Shadow and Dali Society in the Period of the Nationalist Government,” 78–94. 41.  Redding, The Spirit of Chinese Capitalism; Weidenbaum and Hughes, The Bamboo Network. 42.  For a somewhat recent, pernicious example, see Kotkin, “Inside the Sinosphere.” For a strong critique, see Edmund Terence Gomez and Gregor Benton, “Introduction: De-essentializing Capitalism,” 1–20. Other critiques include Susan Greenhalgh, “De-Orientalizing the Chinese Family Firm,” and Arif Dirlik, “Critical Reflections on `Chinese Capitalism’ as Paradigm.” 43.  This is my understanding of Dirlik’s point on p. 314 in “Critical Reflections on ‘Chinese Capitalism.’ ” 44.  David Y. H. Wu, “Chinese Minority Policy and the Meaning of Minority Culture: The Example of Bai in Yunnan, China”; Wu, “Ethnicity and Culture Change”; Wu, “Culture Change and Ethnic Identity among Minorities in China,” 11–22. 45.  Francis L. K. Hsu, Under the Ancestors’ Shadow: Chinese Culture and Personality, 18; Liang Yongjia, “The `Ethnic Error,’ ” 81–82. 46.  C. P. Fitzgerald, The Tower of Five Glories—A Study of the Min Chia of Dali, Yunnan, 12–13; Liang Yongjia covers this very point in “The `Ethnic Error,’ ” 83. 47.  Notar, “Wild Histories,” 77–78. 48.  Notar, “Wild Histories,” 66, 73; Hsu, Under the Ancestors’ Shadow, 99. 49.  Hsu, Under the Ancestors’ Shadow, 99–106, 121, 127–129. 50.  Hsu, Under the Ancestors’ Shadow, 122. For an analysis that corroborates Hsu’s, see Fitzgerald, The Tower of Five Glories, 85–88.



Notes to Chapter 1 221

51.  Zhu Jiazhen, “Dalixian Xizhou Baizu shehui lishi diaocha baogao,” 63–64. 52.  For insights into efforts to claim elite status in Guangdong, see Helen F. Siu and Liu Zhiwei, “Lineage, Market, Pirate, and Dan: Ethnicity in the Pearl River Delta of South China,” 285–310. 53.  David Faure, China and Capitalism: A History of Business Enterprise in Modern China, 37–42. 54.  Madeleine Zelin, The Merchants of Zigong. 55.  One of the more interesting aspects of borderlands business formation is Lipman’s investigation into Gansu Sufi orders that adopted the form of lineage to create transgenerational saintly orders that held property and invested in trade. Jonathan N. Lipman, Familiar Strangers: A History of Muslims in Northwest China, 70–72. 56.  In his 1997 article on Yutang, Pomeranz proposed the idea of northern and southern approaches to business firm formation. See Kenneth Pomeranz, “ ‘Traditional’ Chinese Business Forms Revisited,” 1–38. 57.  Lao She’s Dianxing duanji is quoted in several recent studies, including Chen Yanbin, Dali Baizu Xizhou shangbang, 11. Notar found that the Xizhou mansions might include spiral staircases and crystal chandeliers; see “Wild Histories,” 63. 58.  For examples of Yongchangxiang and Maoheng investments, including their joint partnership in a major silk processing and trading concern, see YPA 132-4-91, 132-4-15, and 132-3-1. 59.  See YPA 132-3-8 for the draft regulations for Yunnan Maoheng Limited Liability Corporation. 60.  Yang Kecheng, “Yongchangxiang jianshi,” 71–77. 61.  Li Jingtian, “Qiao Mian huiyilu,” 139–185. 62.  Li Jingtian, “Yongmaohe shanghao jingying Miandian maoyi jianshi,” 70. 63.  From Yongchangxiang’s Yongchangxiang ziyong dibu (expense ledgers), cited in Yang Kecheng, “Yongchang jianshi,” 47–48. 64.  Baizu shehui lishi diaocha ziliao, vol. 4, 306. 65.  Shi Cilu, “Fuchunheng de xingqi fazhan ji qi moluo,” 1–27. 66.  For Maoheng’s distribution of performance shares in 1938 and 1939, see YPA 132-2-2, pp. 1–8. 67.  Randal Morck and Fan Yang, “The Shanxi Banks,” 5–6; Li Yong, “Shanxi piaohao jili zhidu jiedu,” 32. 68.  Yang Kecheng, “Yongchangxiang jianshi,” 47–48. 69.  Baizu shehui lishi diaochao ziliao, vol. 4, 306. 70.  One local, formerly employed by a trading firm in the 1940s, recalled working under a branch manager who was an opium addict. 71.  Robert Gardella, “Squaring Accounts: Commercial Bookkeeping Methods and Capitalist Rationalism in Late Qing and Republican China,” 326; Guo Daoyang, Zhongguo kuaiji shigao, 91–95.

222 Notes to Chapters 1 and 2

72.  For a description of a pawnshop cash ledger, see Guo Daoyang, Zhongguo kuaiji shigao, 256–257. 73.  Guo Daoyang, Zhongguo kuaiji shigao, 91–95. 74.  Yang Kecheng, “Yongchangxiang jianshi,” 56–57. 75.  For the hiring of Su, see Yang Kecheng, “Yongchangxiang jianshi,” 47–48. For the desirability of Heqing accountants, see Jie Lesa, “Qingzhengyu shanghao huiyi lu,” 28–29, and Shi Cilu, “Fuchunheng,” esp. 6–7. 76.  Hou Miaomiao, “Jindai Dali diqu minjian kuaiji de fazhan jieshao,” 74–78. 77.  Shi Cilu, “Fuchunheng.” 78.  For example, see the series of letters for 1939–1940, sent from the Yunnan Raw Silk Company’s purchasing office in Sichuan back to Kunming headquarters. YPA, 132-3-1. 79.  Christopher J. Napier, “Historiography,” 37. 80.  Neu and Graham, “The Birth of a Nation,” 49–51. 81.  For the classic point about colonial knowledge, see Bernard S. Cohn, Colonialism and Its Forms of Knowledge: The British in India, 1–8. 82.  Gardella, “Squaring Accounts,” esp. 323. 83.  Napier, “Historiography,” 37–38. 84.  For example, see Chan, “Organizational Structure,” 220, 223–224. 85.  Dirlik, “Critical Reflections,” 314. Chapter 2 1.  “Yangwendun xiaoyin,” in Yin Wenhe, Yunnan Heshun qiaoxiangshi gaishu, 410–440; “Yangwendun xiaoyin,” annotated by Yang Fa’en, in Heshun, renwen juan, 289–319. 2.  Yin Chunxiao, “Huaqiao shenghua de huajuan, Rujia sixiang de zhenyan,” 13. 3.  The ten-character format as common to the North was explained to me in a personal communication from Wilt Idema, May 29, 2015. For the introduction to Hakka ballads, see Wilt S. Idema, Passion, Poverty, and Travel: Traditional Hakka Songs and Ballads, 4–9. 4.  Yin Chunxiao, “Huaqiao shenghua de huajuan,” 12–13. 5.  Yin Kangping, “Ziyang xiangcun dazhong xintian, jiaohua jidai bianmin zisun,” 21. 6.  My thanks to Sarah Allen for noting this. Her analysis is supported by local scholars. For primers, see Endymion Wilkinson, Chinese History: A New Manual, 294–296. 7.  Yin Chunxiao, “Huaqiao shenghua de huajuan,” 12; see also Yang Fa’en’s brief introduction to his annotated version in Heshun, renwen juan, 289. Yi Li, Chinese in Colonial Burma: A Migrant Community in a Multiethnic State, 44. 8.  Yin Wenhe, Yunnan Heshun qiaoxiangshi gaishu, 86, 211.



Notes to Chapter 2 223

9.  Liah Greenfield, Spirit of Capitalism: Nationalism and Economic Growth, 13–14. 10.  John E. Herman, Amidst the Clouds and Mist: China’s Colonization of Guizhou, 1200–1700, 10, 14, 79, 139; James Z. Lee, “The Legacy of Immigration in Southwest China, 1250–1850”; Robert B. Marks, China: Its Environment and History, chap. 5. 11.  For excellent studies that have this problem, see Luo Qun, Jindai Yunnan shangren yu shangren ziben, and Zhou Zhisheng, Shangren yu jindai Zhongguo Xinan bianjiang shehui. 12.  The field’s foundational books focus on High Qing expansion: John R. Shepherd, Statecraft and Political Economy on the Taiwan Frontier, 1600–1800; James A. Millward, Beyond the Pass: Economy, Ethnicity, and Empire in Qing Central Asia, 1759–1864; and Peter C. Perdue, China Marches West: The Qing Conquest of Central Eurasia. 13.  Book-length examples include Gray Tuttle, Tibetan Buddhists in the Making of Modern China; David Brophy, Uyghur Nation: Reform and Revolution on the Russia-China Frontier; and Judd C. Kinzley, Natural Resources and the New Frontier: Constructing Modern China’s Borderlands. 14.  Richard J. Lufrano, Honorable Merchants: Commerce and Self-Cultivation in Late Imperial China, 179. 15.  Wolfram Eberhard, Social Mobility in Traditional China, 247–252. 16.  Francis L. K. Hsu, Under the Ancestors’ Shadow: Chinese Culture and Personality, 20–21. 17.  Hsu, Under the Ancestors’ Shadow, 125–126; Francis L. K. Hsu, “Observations on Cross-Cousin Marriage in China,” 90. 18.  For eighteenth-century genealogies, see “Tengchong Cunshi zongpu” and “Tengchong Dieshuihe Lishi zupu.” For the link between the Cun family, wealth from Burma, and the creation of the lineage temple, see Yang Weilong and Cun Linyuan, “Cunshi zongpu yu Heshun Cunshi zongci,” 232. 19.  For the argument about capital from abroad, see Yang and Cun, “Cunshi zongpu,” 234. For the Yin case, see Yin Wenhe, “Heshun Yinshi citing,” 237. 20.  Yang Xiandian, Xizhou zhi, 188. 21.  Hsu, “Observations on Cross-Cousin Marriage,” 83–103. 22.  Hsu, Under the Ancestors’ Shadow, 68–69. 23.  Baizu shehui lishi diaocha, vol. 4, 308–309. 24.  Zhang Peijue, Dali xianzhigao, vol. 7, 7a-10b, 11a-24a. 25.  Zhou Zhisheng, Shangren yu jindai Zhongguo Xinan bianjiang shehui, 172– 179. For Shanghai merchants, see Wen-hsin Yeh, Shanghai Splendor: Economic Sentiments and the Making of Modern China, 1843–1949, 14. 26.  YPA 132-3-194, pp. 78–82, Shanghai Maoheng letter to Kunming, September 24, 1946.

224 Notes to Chapters 2 and 3

27.  Madeleine Zelin, The Merchants of Zigong: Industrial Entrepreneurship in Early Modern China; Qitao Guo, Ritual Opera and Mercantile Lineage: The Confucian Transformation of Popular Culture in Late Imperial Huizhou, 54–55. 28.  Guo, Ritual Opera, 74–77. 29.  I-chieh Fang, “ ‘Talking’ Landscape: The Culture Dynamics of Rushang (Confucian Entrepreneurs) in a Peripheral Migrant Hometown in Yunnan,” 191–204. 30.  As Mr. Cun Shichang has noted, formal courtesies were embedded in everyday life. If one wanted to pay respects, one would first send a proper note. Weddings, funerals, and other formal events required elaborate and precise invitations. 31.  Wen-hsin Yeh, Shanghai Splendor, 13–17; Sven Beckert and Julia B. Rosenbaum, “Introduction,” 1–8. 32.  Wen-hsin Yeh, Shanghai Splendor, 12, 13–17. Chapter 3 1.  That assumption was far from the full truth about the Atatürk regime and women’s emancipation. Birol Baskan, “Why Did Latife Cover Her Hair?” 144–163. 2.  For Cantonese merchant-reformers, see Michael Tsin, Nation, Governance, and Modernity in China: Canton, 1900–1923, 5–9, 13–14, 24–36, 64. For overseas travel and its relationship to reform in China, see Glen Peterson, “Overseas Chinese and Merchant Philanthropy in China: From Culturalism to Nationalism,” 92–93, 102. 3.  This is similar to Chinese migrants elsewhere, as noted in Adam McKeown, Chinese Migrant Networks and Cultural Change: Peru, Chicago, Hawaii, 1900–1936, 279–280. 4.  Yi Li, Chinese in Colonial Burma: A Migrant Community in a Multiethnic State, 8–9, 24. 5.  Li, Chinese in Colonial Burma, 37. 6.  Peterson, “Overseas Chinese and Merchant Philanthropy in China,” 92–93. 7.  Li, Chinese in Colonial Burma, 42–43, 52; McKeown, Chinese Migrant Networks, 280. 8.  James A. Cook, “Bridges to Modernity: Xiamen, Overseas Chinese and Southeast Coastal Modernization, 1843–1937,” 2. 9.  Cook, “Bridges to Modernity,” 4–5, 21–22, chaps. 3, 4. 10.  Margherita Zanasi, “Far from the Treaty Ports: Fang Xianting and the Idea of Rural Modernity in 1930s China,” 113–146; Charles W. Hayford, To the People: James Yen and Village China. Though not a Yale graduate like Fang and Yan, Liang Shuming was, of course, a major influence on the rural reconstruction movement. Guy S. Alitto, The Last Confucian: Liang Shu-ming and the Chinese Dilemma of Modernity. 11.  See, for example, “Wo lixiangzhong meishan de jiating shenghuo” and “Zemyang cai suan wanshan de jiating?” in Lu Mian Tengqiao yuekan, no. 6 (May 1, 1932), n.p.



Notes to Chapter 3 225

12.  “Chongxinhui zhounian jiniankan de yishi he wo duiyu Chongxin jianglai de xiwang,” in Chongxin hui wu zhounian tekan (May 1931), 1–9. 13.  On urban planning, see Michael Tsin, “Canton Remapped,” 19–29. 14.  Katharine C. Grier, “The ‘Blending and Confusion’ of Expensiveness and Beauty: Bourgeois Interiors,” 87–102. 15.  Sven Beckert and Julia B. Rosenbaum, “Introduction,” 1–8. 16.  For Yeh’s points about how the Chinese bourgeoisie justified itself and her fine insights into the rise of the “new merchants” and their new values and material wealth, see Wen-hsin Yeh, Shanghai Splendor: Economic Sentiments and the Making of Modern China, 1843–1949, 1–3 and chap. 1. The distinction between American bourgeoisie and Chinese, however, is my own analysis. 17.  Tim Wright, “Distant Thunder: The Regional Economies of Southwest China and the Impact of the Great Depression,” 711–719. 18.  IOR/V/24/4257 Burma, Land Records Department, “Report on the Transfrontier Trade of Burma during the Year 1916–1917 and the Triennial Period Ending 31st March 1917” (Rangoon: Office of the Superintendent, Government Printing, Burma, 1917), 3–4. 19.  IOR/V/24/4257 Burma, Land Records Department, “Report on the Transfrontier Trade of Burma during the Year 1922–1923 and the Triennial Period Ending 31st March 1923” (Rangoon: Office of the Superintendent, Government Printing, 1923), 4–5. Burma, Land Records Department, “Note on the Transfrontier Trade of Burma for the Year for 1923–1924” (Rangoon: Office of the Superintendent, Government Printing, Burma, 1924), 3–4. 20.  University of Chicago Library (UCL), “Report of the Sericulture Operations, for the Year Ending the 30th June 1927”; UCL, “Report of the Sericulture Operations, Burma, for the Year Ending 31st March 1933,” 1; UCL, “Report of the Superintendent of Cottage Industries Burma, for the Period Ending 30th June 1925,” 24. 21.  “Extract from the Report of the Chinese Maritime Customs for the Year 1937,” 480. 22.  Wright, “Distant Thunder,” table 2, p. 702. 23.  “Bawdwin Mines of the Burma Corporation,” 177–180. 24.  “Burma Corporation has Peculiar Labor Troubles,” 972. 25.  IOR/L/PS/10/337 Burma-China Frontier, Annual Frontier Meetings, 315–320 (O. R. Coales, Consul at Tengyueh to Beilby Alston, Minister at Peking, April 14th, 1922). 26.  FO 228 1952 correspondence to and from Tengyue (1915). 27.  For an example of labor remittances, see Shi Cilu, “Fuchunheng de xingqi fazhan ji qi moluo,” 12–13; Li Jingtian, “Yongmaohe shanghao jingying shilue,” 27–28. For evidence of a smaller business using remittances services, see JZW, Yilichang Minguo 9 huipiao ben. 28.  IOR/V/24/4257 Burma, Land Records Department, “Note on the Transfrontier Trade of Burma for the Year 1915–16.”

226 Notes to Chapter 3

29.  For Yongchangxiang records, see YPA 132-4-93, pp. 16–31, Yongchangxiang Wazhuang 29 niandu hongzhang jiece. For the Oversea-Chinese Bank’s move into Rangoon, see Straits Times, October 28 1919, 6, and Report of the Burma Provincial Banking Enquiry Committee 1929–1930, 1:43. 30.  FO 228 3275, “Tengyueh Intelligence Report March Quarter 1921,” and “Tengyueh Intelligence Report for the Three Months Ended June 15, 1923.” 31.  Yang Kecheng, “Yongchangxiang jianshi,” 59, 60–61. 32.  Yang, “Yongchangxiang jianshi,” 63–80. 33.  Shi, “Fuchunheng,” 11–12; Yang, “Yongchangxiang jianshi,” 71–77. 34.  Zhong Chongmin and Zhu Shouren, Sichuan cansi chanxiao diaocha baogao, 52–55; “Yunnan quansheng shangban ge xiang gongchan yilanbiao,” 50; YPA 132-493, pp. 2–15, Yongchangxiang Dianzhuang 19 nian hongzhangce. 35.  As the Tengchong firm Rongchanggong noted in 1903, accurate communications about goods, pricing, and exchange rates were essential, and the company developed a telegraph code so that single characters represented specific commodities, specific branch locations, and the directions in which payments were moving. JZW Rongchanggong dianma shu (Guangxu 29 [1903]). 36.  “Kunming xian shi jingji diaocha baogao shu,” 139–140. 37.  YPA 132-3-4, Haifang Yichanghang guanyu mianhua, miansha yun tiqu gei Maoheng de han, November 3, 1939, to January 5, 1940. 38.  YPA 132-4-10, 1–36, Maoheng disiqi you 27 nian qi zhi 28 nian zhi zongzhang jiece. 39.  YPA 132-4-38, Wang Shaoyan’s correspondence. 40.  The geography of Maoheng management can be tentatively recreated through memoirs, such as Huang Huairong, “Maoheng shanghao jianjie,” 37–42; company documents, such as YPA 132-4-10, pp. 1–36, Maoheng disiqi you 27 nian qi zhi 28 nian zhi zongzhang jiece; and independent surveys such as Lu Qingxuan, Mian Hua gongshang gailan, 74, 76. 41.  IMH 17-239-25, Hongsheng pihuang wuxian gongsi. 42.  For urban reconstruction and a prominent photo of the Kunming train station, see Kunming shi zhi, 17. 43.  Li Changzhi, “Xinan jixing,” 45–51. 44.  Ren Pei, “Diannan haodi: Zhu jia haoyuan,” 30–31; Jin Yongqiang, “Yunnan Jianshui Tuanshan minju jianzhu zhaji,” 76–80. 45.  For an outline of some of those ideas, see Yang Xiandian, Xizhou zhi, 149–151. 46.  Beth Notar found information that these mansions might include chandeliers and steel used in construction. “Wild Histories: Popular Culture, Place and the Past in Southwest China,” 63. 47.  Zhao Jin, Xizhou shiyun, 54. 48.  Francis L. K. Hsu, Under the Ancestors’ Shadow: Chinese Culture and Personality, 39.



Notes to Chapter 3 227

49.  For the Western suit as a sign of modernity and status, see McKeown, Chinese Migrant Networks, 98. 50.  Li, Chinese Colonial Burma, 4–5. 51. IOR/V/15/70, Census of Burma (Vol. XII), Part I Report C, by C. Lowis (Rangoon: Superintendent of Government Printing, 1902), 131. 52.  Census of Burma, 27, 83. 53.  IOR/V/24/4256 Burma, Land Records Department, “Report on the Transfrontier Trade of Burma during the Year 1910–1902 and the Triennial Period Ending 31st March 1902” (Rangoon: Superintendent, Government Printing, Burma, 1902); “Report on the Transfrontier Trade of Burma and the Adjoining Foreign Countries during the Year 1910–1911 and the Triennial Period Ending 31st March 1911 (Rangoon: Superintendent, Government Printing, Burma, 1911). 54.  When in Heshun, I heard the story of Kang Youwei’s visit to Mandalay. The story of Cun Haiting’s links with Kang and the Tongmenghui can be found in Dong Ping, “Cun Haiting,” 68–71; Zhong Yi, “Huaqiao qizhi Cun Haiting,” 67–71. Li also mentions Cun in Chinese in Colonial Burma, 38. For the establishment and spread of the Tongmenghui in Burma, see Wang Jianan, “Miandian huaqiao yu Xinhai geming,” 53–54. 55.  Prominent among the Yunnanese revolutionaries in Japan were Yang Zhenhong, Li Genyuan, Luo Peijin, and Tang Jiyao. Wang Liyun and Yang Yongping, “Shilun liu Ri xuesheng zai Yunnan xinhai geming zhong de gongxian,” 1–6; William Reid Johnson, “China’s 1911 Revolution in the Provinces of Yunnan and Kweichow,” 11–12, 15–31; Donald S. Sutton, Provincial Militarism and the Chinese Republic: The Yunnan Army, 1905–1925, 34–45. 56.  Sutton, Provincial Militarism, 40. 57.  Yang Fa’en, Yin Wenhe, Zhang Wencai, and Liu Zhendong, “Heshun qiaoxiang jiaoyu de fazhan yu shicheng guanxi,” 17–19. 58.  Yang Faxi, “Xianxinshe yu Chongxinhui,” 269–272. 59.  Yin Wenhe, Yunnan Heshun qiaoxiang shi gaishu, 175–176. 60.  Li Xueshi, “Zhiping yincao,” 340. 61.  Xie Benshu, “Dao Anren—jindai tusi de jiechu daibiao,” 1–7. 62.  Roger V. Des Forges, Hsi-liang and the Chinese National Revolution, 117–118. 63.  Sutton, Provincial Militarism, 102–103. For more on Zhang, see Guo Yufu, “Zhang Wenguan yu xinhai Tengyue qiyi.” 64.  Sutton, Provincial Militarism, 104–105. 65.  Chen Qilin, Huaqiao baojian. 66.  Chen Qilin, Huaqiao baojian, 79. 67.  McKeown, Chinese Migrant Networks, 78–80. 68.  Chie Ikeya, Refiguring Women, Colonialism, and Modernity in Burma, 34, 55. 69.  Report on Public Instruction in Burma, for the Year 1907–1908, 18–19, 21, 26.

228 Notes to Chapter 3

70.  “Tengqiao jiating de Mian hua he jiaoyu luohou,” Lu Mian Tengqiao yuekan, no. 6 (May 1, 1932), n.p. 71.  Cong, Xiaoping, Teachers’ Schools and the Making of the Modern Chinese Nation-State, 1897–1937, 30–31, 36; Suzanne Pepper, Radicalism and Education Reform in Twentieth-Century China, 60–61. 72.  Cong, Teacher’s Schools, 72; Pepper, Radicalism and Educational Reform, 60–62. 73.  Pepper, Radicalism and Educational Reform, 68–69. 74.  Cook, “Bridges to Modernity,” chap. 4. 75.  Robert J. Culp, Articulating Citizenship: Civic Education and Student Politics in Southeastern China, 1912–1940, 447–448, 451 458. 76.  Zhang Peijue, Dali xianzhigao, vol. 7, 7a-10b, 11a-24a, 77.  Mette Halskov Hansen, Lessons in Being Chinese: Minority Education and Ethnic Identity in Southwest China, 33–48. 78.  “Nuxue jiaoyu xianchu Li Renjie,” 9–13. 79.  Zhou Liying, “Cong Yunnan kan jindai Zhongguo bianjiang minzu diqu nuzi de chansheng ji yingxiang,” 89–95; Hansen, Lessons, 93–96. 80.  Chen Qilin, Huaqiao baojian, 2–7, 77–78. 81.  Chen Qilin, Huaqiao baojian, 77–78. 82.  “Tengqiao jiating de Mian hua he jiaoyu luohou.” 83.  Chen Qilin, Huaqiao baojian, 87; Yang Fa’en, “Mianbei diqu Tengchong Heshun shangjia shetuan yilan,” 34; Yang Fa’en et al., “Heshun qiaoxiang jiaoyu,” 19. 84.  Xu Dong and Ma Xiaolong, “Minguo shiqi lu Mian Huaqiao shetuan dui qiaoxiang difang jiaoyu de yingxiang,” 21; Chen Qilin, Huaqiao baojian, 79, 112. 85.  Xin Tengchong, no. 8 (July 1927). 86.  Lu Mian Tengqiao yuekan, no. 5 (August 25, 1931), no pagination. 87.  Chongxin hui wu zhounian tekan, 61. 88.  Cun Shu, “Chongxinhui zhouniankan de yiyi he wo dui Chongxinhui jianglai de xiwang,” Chongxinhui wu zhounian tekan, 1–2. 89.  Chongxin hui wu zhounian tekan, Preface. 90.  Maitrii Aung-Thwin, Return of the Galon King: History, Law, and Rebellion in Colonial Burma, 16–19. 91.  Lu Mian Tengqiao yuekan, no. 5. 92.  See distribution information in Lu Mian Tengqiao yuekan, no. 5. 93.  Cun Shu, “Chongxin hui zhounian jiniankan de yishi he wo duiyu Chongxin jianglai de xiwang,” 1–9. 94.  “Jiaxiang lai de yi feng xin,” Chongxin hui wu zhounian tekan, 93. 95.  Cun Shu, “Chongxin hui zhounian jiniankan de yishi he wo duiyu Chongxin jianglai de xiwang,” 1–2. 96.  Sources on the organization of the Chongxin Association include Xu and Ma,



Notes to Chapter 3 229

“Minguo shiqi lu Mian Huaqiao shetuan,” 20–26, and Li, Chinese in Colonial Burma, 50–51. 97.  “Heshun disi zhounian dahui yishilu” and “Heshun diwu zhounian dahui yishilu,” in Chongxin hui wu zhounian tekan. 98.  “Heshun Chongxin hui zongzhang,” in Chongxin hui wu zhounian tekan, 38–45. 99.  “Chongxin hui wunian de huigu,” in Chongxin hui wu zhounian tekan, 15–17 100.  “A Woman’s Cry,” Lu Mian Tengqiao yuekan, no. 5. 101.  Lu Mian Tengqiao yuekan, no. 5. 102.  “Duiyu xiangxiao “Fugu” de jiantao” and “He zhuzhang du jing de xianshengmen tan jiju,” Heshunxiang, vol. 1, no 1 (1936), 16–17. 103.  Cook, “Bridges to Modernity,” 3. 104.  “Wu xiang shehui zhuangkuang,” in Chongxin hui wu zhounian tekan, 23–26; Cun Shu, “Chongxin hui zhounian jiniankan de yishi he wo duiyu Chongxin jianglia de xiwang”; “Chongxin hui wunian de huigu,”15. 105.  For a more thorough introduction to redemptive societies, see David Ownby, Falun Gong and the Future of China, esp. 33–39, and Vincent Goossaert and David A. Palmer, The Religious Question in Modern China, 93–98. 106.  Goossaert and Palmer, The Religious Question, 98–100, 104; Wang Jianchuan, “An Exploration of the Early History of the Tongshanshe (1912–1945),” trans. David Ownby, 121–131; Wang Jianchuan, “Tongshanshe zaoqi de tedian ji zai Yunnan de fazhan,” 127–159. 107.  “Huaqiao de jiaoyu yu mixin,” Lu Mian Tengqiao yuekan, no. 5. 108.  I am very grateful to those who provided tremendous insight and context during our chats. 109.  Zi Lian, “Teng Miao jiaotong gaidao zhi qushi,” and “Jiaxiang xiaoxi yishu,” in Heshun Chongxinhui dijiu zhounian jiniankan (1935), 36–38, 56–58. 110.  IMH 18-22-01-036-07, “Dianxi Baiyi duli sheji weiyuanhui ji tusi datongmeng Ganyai tusi bufa huodong qingxing diaochabiao,” 134–136. 111.  Xu and Ma, “Minguo shiqi lu Miao Huaqiao shetuan,” 22. 112.  Xu and Ma, “Minguo shiqi lu Mian Huaqiao shetuan,” 23. 113.  Lu Mian Tengqiao yuekan, no. 6 (May 1, 1932). 114.  Xu and Ma, “Minguo shiqi lu Mian Huaqiao shetuan,” 23–24. 115.  The radio story is well known locally, and I heard it during my visit to the Heshun Library in July 2012. 116.  Tengyue ribao, February 29, 1940. 117.  Yang Xiandian, Xizhou zhi, 229–230. 118.  Hsu, Under the Ancestors’ Shadow, 20–21; for coeducation, see Yang Shuyi in Xizhou zhi, 230–234. 119.  Lao She’s Dianxing duanji, cited in Chen Yanbin, Dali Baizu, 11.

230 Notes to Chapter 4

Chapter 4 1.  The grain was likely barley or corn. Corn has more calories than barley, so if we assume that the entire crop was corn, then we calculate the following. According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, there are 2,561 calories per liter of white corn. Four hundred liters of corn thus contain 1.0244 million calories, providing the family with an average of a little over 2,877 calories per day—or just enough for one adult male. Sources: U.S. Department of Agriculture, Agricultural Research Service, “National Nutrient Database”; U.S. Department of Agriculture, Center for Nutrition Policy and Promotion, “Estimated Calorie Needs per Day.” 2.  “Danbaxian Badi xiang Qiongshan cun shehui diaocha,” 28–29. 3.  “Danbaxian Badi xiang,” 28–29. 4.  Emily T. Yeh, Taming Tibet: Landscape Transformation and the Gift of Chinese Development, 6, 21. 5.  Andrew Martin Fischer, The Disempowered Development of Tibet in China: A Study in the Economics of Marginalization, chap. 1, esp. p. 24. 6.  IOR/L/PS 10 884, Louis King, British Consular Officer, Tachienlu to His Majesty’s Minister, Beijing, June 28, 1922. 7.  “Kangding xian Wazexiang diaocha baogao,” 4–6. 8.  Mei Xinru, Xikang, 281–285. 9.  Patrick Ramzi Booz, “Tea, Trade and Transport in the Sino-Tibetan Borderlands.” 10.  Mandy Sadan, Being and Becoming Kachin: Histories beyond the State in the Borderworlds of Burma, esp. 75–77. 11.  Shi Shuo and Zou Libo, “Jindai Kangqu Shaanshang zai Han-Zang hudong yu wenhua liuzhong de juese,” 5–11. 12.  Booz, “Tea, Trade and Transport,” 152. For the best study to date on the achak kapa, see Yudru Tsomu, “Guozhuang Trading Houses and Tibetan Middlemen in Dartsedo, the ‘Shanghai of Tibet,’ ” 71–121. 13.  Shi and Zou, “Jindai Kangqu Shaan shang,” 6, 8. 14.  Chengdu shi Yisilanjiao xiehui, in Zhongguo nanfang Huizu jingji shangmao ziliao xuanbian, 277. 15.  William Woodville Rockhill, The Land of the Lamas: Notes of a Journey through China, Mongolia and Tibet, 284–285; Alexander Hosie, Mr. Hosie’s Journey to Tibet, 1904, 76–77; Shen Xu, “Dali Baizu mabang yu shangbang de xingcheng yu fazhan,” 260–262. 16.  IOR/L/PS/11/90, O. R. Coales, “Report of Trade of Tachienlu and the Marches” (1916), file 921/15. 17.  YPA 132-4-93, pp. 2–15, Yongchangxiang Dianzhuang 19 nian hongzhangce. Among the commodities that the general headquarters had on hand at the end of this accounting period were 2,699 jin of beimu worth 23,353.06 yuan; 406 jin of zhimu worth 1,218 yuan; and 40 jin of caterpillar fungus worth 358.87 yuan.



Notes to Chapter 4 231

18.  YPA 132-4-17, pp. 45–50, Maoheng Xikang fenzhan Jianchang zhan jinjiang Mingguo 29 nian 1 yue 1 ri qi zhi 12 yue 30 ri zhi, suo you huotuo shoufa, yinhuo ruchu, zhaoju qingce; YPA 132-4-17, pp. 51–57, Jinjiang Maoheng Xiaguan fenzhan zi Mingguo 29 nian 1 yue 1 ri qi zhi 12 yue 31 ri zhi, suoyou yinhuo ruchu shoufa dengxiao zaoju qingce. 19.  Shu Zizhi and Su Songlin, “Heqing ‘Xingshenghe’ shanghao shilue,” 273. 20.  Zhou Zhisheng, Shangren yu jindai Zhongguo Xinan bianjiang shehui, 226–228. 21.  YPA 132-4-71, pp. 43–51, Hengsheng Lijiang zhuang suoshou gehuo qingce. 22.  Waijiaobu to Meng Zang weiyuanhui (May 9, 1940), in Liu Limei and Cao Bihong, eds., Minguo shiqi Xizang ji Zangqu jingji kaifa jianshe dang’an xuanbian, 292–295. 23.  Evidence from Liu and Cao, eds., Minguo shiqi Xizang, 423–424. 24.  YPA 132-2-10, pp. 4–7. 25.  YPA 132-2-10, pp. 4–7. 26.  Coales, “Report of Trade of Tachienlu and the Marches.” 27.  Xiuyu Wang, China’s Last Imperial Frontier: Late Qing Expansion in Sichuan’s Tibetan Borderlands, chap. 4. 28.  Laura Hostetler, Qing Colonial Enterprise: Ethnography and Cartography in Early Modern China, 41–49. 29.  My favorite explanation of these approaches to difference is in Emma Jinhua Teng, Taiwan’s Imagined Geography: Chinese Colonial Travel Writing and Pictures, 1683–1895, chap. 4. 30.  Donald S. Sutton, “Ethnicity and the Miao Frontier in the Eighteenth Century,” 191–193. 31.  James A. Millward, Beyond the Pass: Economy, Ethnicity, and Empire in Qing Central Asia, 1759–1864, 32–33. 32.  Booz, “Tea, Trade, and Transport,” 131–132, 140. 33.  Yudru Tsomu, The Rise of Gönpo Namgyel in Kham: The Blind Warrior of Nyarong, xx. 34.  Wang, China’s Last Imperial Frontier, chap. 2. 35.  The information in this paragraph comes from a number of excellent works, including William Coleman, “The Uprising at Batang: Khams and Its Significance in Chinese and Tibetan History,” 33–38; Tsomu, Rise of Gönpo Namgyel, 3–5, 8–9; Wang, China’s Last Imperial Frontier, chap. 2; Wim Van Spengen, “Frontier History of Southern Kham: Banditry and War in the Multi-Ethnic Fringe Lands of Charting, Mili, and Gyethang, 1890–1940,” 7–30; William Woodville Rockhill, Diary of a Journey through Mongolia and Tibet in 1891 and 1892, 359. 36.  A careful analysis of Zuo and his debt to Wei Yuan is found in Nailene Josephine Chou, “Frontier Studies and Changing Frontier Administration in Late Ch’ing China: The Case of Sinkiang, 1759–1911,” 221–244. See also Millward, Beyond the Pass, 241–251.

232 Notes to Chapter 4

37.  Zuo Wenxiang gong quanji, vol. 3, juan 53, 30a–39a; Zuo Wenxiang gong quanji, vol. 3, juan 51, 17a–19b. 38.  Li Yunlin, Xichui shilue, “Shanhou fanglue,” 30–35. 39.  Sudebilige (Shirnuut Sodbilig), Wan Qing zhengfu dui Xinjiang, Menggu, he Xizang zhengce yanjiu, 53–55. 40.  “Lun Kashiga’er shi,” Shenbao, 1. 41.  James Leibold, Reconfiguring Chinese Nationalism: How the Qing Frontier and Its Indigenes Became Chinese, 19–20. 42.  Leibold, Reconfiguring Chinese Nationalism, 29–33, 36–37; James Leibold, “Positioning ‘Minzu’ within Sun Yat-Sen’s Discourse of Minzuzhuyi,” 163–211. 43.  Leibold, Reconfiguring Chinese Nationalism, 29–33, 36–37; Leibold, “Positioning ‘Minzu.’ ” 44.  Sudebilige, Wan Qing zhengfu, 71–75; Mei-hua Lan, “China’s ‘New Administration’ in Mongolia,” 41–44. 45.  Christopher P. Atwood, Young Mongols and Vigilantes in Inner Mongolia’s Interregnum Decades, 1911–1931, 1:46, 63; Sudebilige, Wan Qing zhengfu, 76–81; Lan, “China’s ‘New Administration’ in Mongolia,” 41–44. 46.  Cen Chunxuan, “Tongchou Xibei quanju zhuosi biantong banfa zhe,” 921–926. 47.  Lan, “China’s ‘New Administration’ in Mongolia,” 45–50. 48.  Atwood, Young Mongols, 39–40, 46; Uradyn E. Bulag, “Going Imperial: Tibeto-Mongolian Buddhism and Nationalism in China and Inner Asia,” 261–262. 49.  Lan, “China’s ‘New Administration’ in Mongolia,” 45–50. 50.  Tsomu, Rise of Gönpo Namgyel, 231–238; Scott Relyea, “Conceiving the ‘West’: Early Twentieth-Century Visions of Kham,” 185–187. 51.  I first wrote about this in 2008 in “ ‘Grieving for Tibet’: Conceiving the Modern State in Late-Qing Inner Asia,” esp. 6, 14–17. For a more recent and Kham-focused version of this thesis, see Relyea, “Conceiving the ‘West.’ ” 52.  Prasenjit Duara has written on this process in regard to 1930s Manchuria, although he identifies the process long after its origins in the late Qing. Prasenjit Duara, Sovereignty and Authenticity: Manchukuo and the East Asian Modern, 23. 53.  Tong Lam, A Passion for Facts: Social Surveys and the Construction of the Chinese Nation-State, 1900–1949, 4. 54.  Wang, “China’s Last Imperial Frontier,” 67–68. 55.  See chap. 3. 56.  Wang Rongmao, “Tongchou Shu Zang quanju lun,” 2–3. 57.  Chen Qichang, “Jing Zangwei yi gu Shujiang yi,” 3–6. 58.  “Xizang fengsu,” Qingyi bao, no. 76 (April 19, 1901). 59.  Xinmin congbao, no. 55. 60.  Coleman, “The Uprising at Batang,” 50–51, for Zhao’s references to



Notes to Chapter 4 233

Euro-American colonialism. See also Elliot Sperling, “The Chinese Venture in K’am, 1904–1911, and the Role of Chao Erh-feng,” 10–36. 61.  Wang, China’s Last Imperial Frontier, chaps. 6 and 7. 62.  Joseph D. Lawson, “Warlord Colonialism: State Fragmentation and Chinese Rule in Kham, 1911–1949,” 300–302. 63.  Scott Relyea, “Yokes of Gold and Threads of Silk: Sino-Tibetan Competition for Authority in Early Twentieth Century Kham,” 996–1000. 64.  Joseph D. Lawson, “Warlord Colonialism,” 300–302; Relyea “Yokes of Gold,” 1006–1009. 65.  IOR/L/PS 10 435, Consul General Chengtu to Secretary of the Government of India, November 9, 1916, and W. Meyrick Hewlitt, Acting Consul General Chengtu to Foreign Secretary to the Govt of India, February 5, 1917. 66.  Booz, “Tea, Trade and Transport,” 163–164. 67.  Yang Kecheng, “Yongchangxiang jianshi,” 64–65; Huang Huairong, “Maoheng shanghao jianjie,” 38. 68.  Zhou Taixuan, Xikang tongzhigao, gongshangzhi (n.d.), 220–223. 69.  Zhou Taixuan, Xikang tongzhigao gongshangzhi, 227. 70.  “Xikangsheng yaocai diaocha baogaoshu” (1990), 407–410. 71.  Zhou Taixuan, Xikang tongzhigao gongshangzhi, p. 227. For a good listing of the markets that medicinal materials were shipped to, see “Xikangsheng yaocai diaocha baogaoshu,” 413–414. 72.  Xikang tongzhigao—nongxubian, in Jindai Kangqu dang’an ziliao xuanbian, 231–232; see also “Xikangsheng yaocai diaocha baogaoshu,” 410, which reports on both trade and sales by Khampas. 73.  Zhou Taixuan, Xikang tongzhigao shangyezhi, 227. 74.  “Xikangsheng yaocai diaocha baogaoshu,” 410. For bachong as Han, see Zhou Taixuan, Xikang tongzhigao shangyezhi, 221. 75.  Shi and Zou, “Jindai Kangqu Shaan shang,” p. 7. 76.  “Xikangsheng yaocai diaocha baogao shu,” 410. 77.  IMH 20-00-63-016-03, document 5 (MG36/11/28), Xikangsheng Jiansheting to Nonglinbu. 78.  Zhou Taixuan, Xikang tongzhigao—gongshangzhi, 227–230. 79.  “Xikangsheng yaocai diaocha baogaoshu,” 410–411. 80.  Xikang tongzhigao, nongxu bian, 231. 81.  Booz, “Tea, Trade and Transport,” 299–304. 82.  Booz, “Tea, Trade and Transport,” 305. 83.  Tsomu, “Guozhuang Trading Houses and Tibetan Middlemen in Dartsedo”; “Kangshi guozhuang diaocha baogao shu” (1936/12), 258–259. 84.  “Xikangsheng yaocai diaocha baogaoshu,” 411.

234 Notes to Chapters 4 and 5

85.  Xikang tongzhi, nongxu bian, 231–232. 86.  Relyea, “Conceiving the ‘West,’ ” 189. 87.  Li Enhan, Wan Qing de shouhui kuangquan yundong, 4–5. 88.  Kuangwu dang, 6:3206–3207, Liu Kunyi, GX22/8/10 (1896/9/16). 89.  Shellen Xiao Wu, Empires of Coal: Fueling China’s Entry into the Modern World Order, 1860–1920, 141–144. 90.  Relyea, “Conceiving the ‘West,’ ” 189–190. 91.  Lawson, “Warlord Colonialism,” 300–302. 92.  Peng Wenbin, “Frontier Process, Provincial Politics and Movements for Khampa Autonomy during the Republican Period,” 57–84. 93.  Lawson, “Warlord Colonialism,” 300–302. 94.  Lawson, “Warlord Colonialism,” 303, 306. 95.  IMH 18-24-05-63-001-01, Xikangsheng guanshang heban Muli jinkuang gongsi, September 6, 1939. 96.  Sichuansheng dang’an guan ed., Jindai Kangqu dang’an ziliao xuanbian, 171–177. 97.  Peng Wenbin, “Frontier Process,” 60. 98.  Chuan Kang jianshe shicha tuan, “Xikang zu shicha baogao” (1939), 237–239. 99.  IMH 20-00-63-009-04, Fazhan Xikang nongye de buzhou he tujing. 100.  IMH 20-00-63-017-09, Xikangsheng gexian 32 niandu kehuang jihua. 101.  He Yong, “Litang jiefang chuqi de minzu shangye,” 13–14. Chapter 5 1.  Miao Yuntai, Miao Yuntai huiyi lu, 29–31; Yang Kecheng, “Yunnan Miaoxi difang guanliao ziben gaishu,” 34–35; for confirmation of the transfer of responsibilities, see Xingzhengyuan nongcun fuxing weiyuanhui, 31–32. 2.  Yang Kecheng, “Yunnan Miaoxi,” 34–35. 3.  For example, Chen Zhengping, Yunnan zaoqi gongyehua jincheng yanjiu, 1840 nian-1949 nian, 7, 258–293. 4.  J. C. S. Hall, The Yunnan Provincial Faction, 1927–1937, 6, 146–149. 5.  Shi Yun, “Fu Dian zhi meng: Minguo Yunnan jinrong fazhan de jingyan yu jiaoxun—yi Fudian yinhang, Fudian xin yinhang wei zhongxin,” 8–12, 166. 6.  R. Daniel Wadhwani and Marcelo Bucheli, “The Future of the Past in Management and Organizational Studies,” 4; Per H. Hansen, “Organizational Culture and Organizational Change: Transformation of Saving Banks in Denmark, 1965–1990,” 922–923. 7.  Zheng Youkui, Cheng Linsun, and Zhang Chuanhong, Jiu Zhongguo de ziyuan weiyuanhui—shishi yu pingjia; Cheng Linsun, “The Industrial Activities of the National Resources Commission and Their Legacies in Communist China.” The NRC also factors into much of the work by Morris L. Bian in The Making of the State Enterprise System in Modern China: The Dynamics of Institutional Change.



Notes to Chapter 5 235

8.  Yu Zongze, ed., Yunnan xingzheng jishi, di’er bian, jingji tiyao, 1b-2a. 9.  For NRC managers as part of a bureaucratic organization that serves state policy, see Bian, The Making of the State Enterprise System, esp. 82–87. For the NRC enterprises as lacking autonomy and a need to make profits, see Cheng “The Industrial Activities of the National Resources Commission,” 62–63. 10.  For important summaries of the reform period and the use of Company Law to restructure China’s state-owned enterprises, see Barry Naughton, The Chinese Economy: Transitions and Growth, 299–300, 308–309, 314–315; Donald C. Clarke, “Corporate Governance in China: An Overview,” 497–498. 11.  This is covered in Bian’s magisterial The Making of the State Enterprise System. 12.  Cited in an edict of May 25, 1884, in Qingshilu you guan Yunnan shiliao huibian, 4:250–251. 13.  YPA 77–5–298, p. 12, Liu Jun to Shiyesi, October 29, 1912, in Yunnan jindai kuangye dang’an shiliao xuanbian, di san ji (shang) (hereafter YJKD), 53. 14.  Li Enhan, Wan Qing de shouhui kuangquan yundong; Donald S. Sutton, Provincial Militarism and the Chinese Republic: The Yunnan Army, 1905–25; Roger V. Des Forges, Hsi-liang and the Chinese National Revolution; Yunnan daxue lishixi, Yunnan yejin shi; Chen Zhenping, Yunnan zaoqi gongyehua. 15.  Shellen Xiao Wu, Empires of Coal: Fueling China’s Entry into the Modern World Order, 1860–1920. 16.  Margherita Zanasi, Saving the Nation: Economic Modernity in Republican China; Lai Chi-kong, “The Qing State and Merchant Enterprise: The China Merchants’ Company, 1872–1902.” 17.  Albert Feuerwerker, China’s Early Industrialization: Sheng Hsuan-Huai (1844–1916) and Mandarin Enterprise; Wellington K. K. Chan, Merchants, Mandarins, and Modern Enterprise in Late Ch’ing China. For a nice review of the field, see Morris Bian, “Interpreting Enterprise, State, and Society: A Critical Review of the Literature in Modern Chinese Business History, 1978–2008,” 423–462. 18.  For the growing list of exceptions, see Kwangmin Kim, Borderland Capitalism: Turkestan Produce, Qing Silver, and the Birth of an Eastern Market; Judd C. Kinzley, Natural Resources and the New Frontier: Constructing Modern China’s Borderlands. In Uyghur Nation: Reform and Revolution on the Russia-China Frontier, moreover, David Brophy explores the role of Uyghur merchants in social, cultural, and political change. 19.  Richard White, “The Nationalization of Nature,” 980. 20.  On new approaches to business history and the history of capitalism, see Stephanie Decker, Matthias Kipping, and R. Daniel Wadhwani, “New Business Histories! Plurality in Business History Research Methods,” 30–40. For Hyman’s points, see Louis Hyman, “Why Write the History of Capitalism?” 21.  Patrick Joyce, The State of Freedom: A Social History of the British State since 1800, 19.

236 Notes to Chapter 5

22.  Bian, The Making of the State Enterprise System, esp. 213–214. 23.  Kinzley, Natural Resources and the New Frontier, 2–3. 24.  Arturo Escobar, Encountering Development: The Making and Unmaking of the Third World, 4–5, 9–10; Corey Ross, “The Tin Frontier: Mining, Empire, and Environment in Southeast Asia, 1870s–1930s,” 454–479. 25.  David Atwill, The Chinese Sultanate: Islam, Ethnicity, and the Panthay Rebellion in Southwest China, 1856–1873, 183, 185. 26.  Kuangwu dang, 6:3171–3272; Qingshilu you guan Yunnan shiliao huibian, 4:249. 27.  Kuangwu dang, 6:3171–3272. 28.  Zuo wenxiang gong quanji, vol. 3, juan 50, pp. 75a-78a, memorial dated GX3/6/16. 29.  Kuangwu dang, 6:3171–3176. 30.  Scott Relyea, “Indigenizing International Law in Early Twentieth-Century China: Territorial Sovereignty in the Sino-Tibetan Borderland,” 1–60. 31.  Bradley Camp Davis, Imperial Bandits: Outlaws and Rebels in the China-Vietnam Borderlands, 32–37. 32.  Lloyd E. Eastman, Throne and Mandarins: China’s Search for a Policy during the Sino-French Controversy, 1880–1885, 51–57. 33.  Kirk W. Larsen, Tradition, Treaties, and Trade: Qing Imperialism and Chosŏn Korea, 1850–1910, 13–14, 16, 289. 34.  Eastman, Throne and Mandarins, 57–64. 35.  Addendum to Zongli yamen edict, in Zhong Fa zhanzheng ziliao, 5:132–133. Lloyd Eastman pointed out this document in Throne and Mandarins. 36.  Cen Yuying memorial (GX 9/1/9), in Zhongfa zhanzhen ziliao, 5:134–136; Eastman, Throne and Mandarins, 64. 37.  Eastman, Throne and Mandarins, 70, 201–202. 38.  Eastman, Throne and Mandarins, 204–205. 39.  Zanasi, Saving the Nation, 27–28. 40.  Larsen, Tradition, Treaties, and Trade; Relyea, “Indigenizing International Law.” 41.  IMH Miandian dang 01-23, 4-2, Guangxu 11/12/21, Cen Yuying to Zongli Yamen. 42.  Long Xiaoyan, “Wan Qing bianjiang weiji zhong Yunnan tusi zhidu de bianhua,” 127–128; Liang Chuyang, “Cen Yuying guofang sixiang zai Zhong Mian bianjiang weiji zhong de shijian,” 94–100. 43.  Xue Fucheng Chushi riji xuke, 1:25a–b; IMH Miandian dang 0-23, 5-2, Guangxu 17/3/25, copy of Xue Fucheng memorial; IMH Miandian dang 01-23, 5-2, Guangxu 17/6/14, Copy of Xue Fucheng memorial. 44.  IMH Miandian dang 01-23, 6-4, Guangxu 19/11/17, Wang Wenshao communication.



Notes to Chapter 5 237

45.  Chen Zhengping, Yunnan zaoqi gongyehua, 161–4; Chen Li, “Guandu shangban,” 67–70; Lai Chi-kong, “The Qing State and Merchant Enterprise,” 140. 46.  Qingshilu you guan Yunnan shiliao huibian, 4:250–251, Guangxu 10/4/xuwu (1884/5/8) and Guangxu 10/5/yigai (1884/5/25). 47.  Qingshilu you guan Yunnan shiliao huibian, 4:250, Guangxu 9/10/jiayan (1883/11/6). 48.  Kuangwu dang, 6:3187. 49.  Kuangwu dang, 6:3192–3194. 50.  Kuangwudang, 6:3192–3194. Note the similarities to how China Merchants’ was turned over to Tang Jingxing and Xu Run—and for the details on China Merchants’ dividends, see Lai, “The Qing State and Merchant Enterprise,” 144. As Lai notes, by the mid-1880s, China Merchants’ could no longer rely on robust Qing subsidies—or official hands off. 51.  Chen Li, “Guandu shangban,” 69–70. Chen Zhengping, Yunnan zaoqi gongyehua, 161–164. 52.  Kuangwu dang, 6:3201–3202. 53.  Kuangwudang, 6:3203, 3204. 54.  Chen Zhengping, Yunnan zaoqi gongyehua, 161–164; Yunnan daxue lishixi, Yunnan yejin shi, 80–82. 55.  John Hillman, The International Tin Cartel, 27–29. 56.  For small-scale levels of capitalization as the norm, see Madeleine Zelin, “The Structure of the Chinese Economy during the Qing Period.” For information on mining at Gejiu, this section relies on the outstanding explanations in Peter J. Golas, Science and Civilization in China, 5:16, 99–106, table 13, 285–287, 343, and 410–415. 57.  This detailed information also comes from Golas, Science and Civilization in China, 5:17, 99–106, 336, 357–363. 58.  William F. Collins, Mineral Enterprise in China, 53–54. 59.  Robert Lee, France and the Exploitation of China, 1885–1901: A Study in Economic Imperialism, 240–266; Collins, Mineral Enterprise in China, 53–54; Hou-chi Ming, Foreign Investment and Economic Development in China, 68. 60.  An English version of the convention is in Collins, Mineral Enterprise in China, appendix V, 262–271. For a Chinese summary, see IMH 02-04-028-01-009, Emile Rocher to Waiwubu, Guangxu 28/3/20 (April 27, 1902). On the care and honesty of Qing officials, see Sutton, Provincial Militarism and the Chinese Republic, 30–33. 61.  For Collins’s account, see Mineral Enterprise, 65–67; for the Qing account, see a copy of Xiliang’s report in IMH 02-04-028-02-023, Guangxu 34/03/23 (April 23, 1908). For Des Forges’s careful reading of this incident, see Hsi-liang, 103–106.

238 Notes to Chapter 5

62.  Li Enhan, Wan Qing de shouhui kuangquan yundong; Wu, Empires of Coal, 131–134. 63.  Sutton, Provincial Militarism, 34–37, 88–90; for the original, see Collins, Mineral Enterprise, 70–72. 64.  See Collins’s translation of the Yunnan Daily News, July 22, 1910, enclosure to FO 228 2640 Yunnan Syndicate 1, Consul General O’Brien-Butler to Max Miller, Chargé d’Affaires in Beijing, September 7, 1910. 65.  Collins, Mineral Enterprise, 68–69. 66.  YPA 77-4-77, Xiliang to Quanyedao, GX34/10/03 (October 26, 1908) and Baohua tikuang youxian gongsi to Yunnan Quanyedao, Guangxu 34/10/08, (November 1, 1908), in YJKD, 1:22, 23–24. 67.  For Xiliang in Sichuan, see Des Forges, Hsi-liang, 58–59, 74, 190. 68.  YPA 77-4-77, Baohua documents in YJKD, 1:24–36. 69.  Yunnan daxue lishixi, Yunnan yejin shi, 83; Chen Zhengping, Yunnan zaoqi gongyehua, 168–169; Luo Qun, Jindai Yunnan shangren yu shangren ziben, 162–163. 70.  Yunnan daxue lishixi, Yunnan yejin shi, 82–83; Chen Zhenping, Yunnan zaoqi gongyehua, 164, 168–169, 193–194; YPA 77-8-729 “Yunnansheng Gejiu xiwu gufen youxian gongsi zhangcheng,” in YJKD, 1:228–229. 71.  Des Forges, Hsi-liang, 58–59, 70. 72.  Des Forges, Hsi-liang, 71–73. 73.  Des Forges, Hsi-liang, 73–80. 74.  Des Forges, Hsi-liang, 82, 85, 115; Erik Mueggler, The Paper Road: Archive and Experience in the Botanical Exploration of West China and Tibet, 75–76. For more on Dao Anren, see chap. 3. 75.  Des Forges, Hsi-liang, 115–121, 129. 76.  Wu Qiang, “Xinhai qianhou Yunnan shehui de bianqian,” 7–10. 77.  Marshal D. Draper, “The Tin Industry of Yunnan,” 489. 78.  Miao Yuntai, Miao Yuntai huiyi lu, 16–18. 79.  Hillman, The International Tin Cartel, 48–49. 80.  Li Enhan, Wan Qing de shouhui kuangquan yundong, 4–5. 81.  Kuangwu dang, 6:3206–3207. 82.  Yunnan daxue lishixi, Yunnan yejin shi, 84–86. 83.  YPA 77-5-298, p. 12, Liu Jun to Shiyesi, October 29, 1912, in YJKD, 1:53. 84.  YPA 77-5-298, pp. 14–17, Southern Intendant Liu Jun to Cai E, MG2/3/19, in YJKD, 1:53–55. 85.  James Leibold, “Searching for Han: Early Twentieth-Century Narratives on Chinese Origins and Development,” 210–233. 86.  Li Genyuan to Cai E, cited in Ma Yahui, “Mingguo shiqi Yunnan gaitu guiliu shulue,” 54. 87.  Mandy Sadan, A Guide to Colonial Sources on Burma: Ethnic and Minority Histories of Burma in the India Office Records, British Library, 224–226.



Notes to Chapter 6 239

Chapter 6 1.  Donald S. Sutton, Provincial Militarism and the Chinese Republic: The Yunnan Army, 1905–25, 266–267. 2.  J. C. S. Hall, The Yunnan Provincial Faction, 1927–1937, 83. 3.  Shi Yun, “Fu Dian zhi meng: Minguo Yunnan jinrong fazhan de jingyan yu jiaoxun—yi Fudian yinhang, Fudian xin yinhang wei zhongxin,” 79; Hall, The Yunnan Provincial Faction, 82–84. 4.  John Hillman, The International Tin Cartel, 55, 83; Hall, The Yunnan Provincial Faction, 153. 5.  Pan Xianlin, “ ‘Jindaihua’ lichenzhong de Dian Chuan Qian bian Yizu shehui,” 97–100. 6.  Hall, The Yunnan Provincial Faction, 60. 7.  Shi Yun, “Fu Dian zhi meng,” 80–81; Hall, The Yunnan Provincial Faction, 86–89. 8.  Shi Yun, “Fu Dian zhi meng,” 84–88. 9.  Shi Yun, “Fu Dian zhi meng,” 92–94. 10.  Hall, The Yunnan Provincial Faction, 65–68. 11.  Pan Xianlin, “ ‘Jindaihua’ lichenzhong de Dian Chuan Qian bian Yizu shehui,” 101, 103. 12.  Yang Kecheng, “Yunnan Miao xi difang guanliao ziben gaishu,” 35, 47–48. 13.  Xie Benshu, “Miao Yuntai xiansheng jiazu zuji wenti zhi yanjiu,” 56–58. 14.  Dong Mengxiong and Luo Qun, “Jindai Yunnan de shiye kaituozhe he licaijia Miao Yuntai shulun,” 53–59. For Miao’s characteristic Yunnanese sangfroid, see Shi Yun, “Fu Dian zhi meng,” 100–102, who describes him as a typical Yunnanese—a born financier because of his cool demeanor and his risk-taking nature. 15.  IMH 02-04-028-04-029, Zhang Kun et al. to the Ministry for Foreign Affairs, XT03/07/02 (1911/08/25). 16.  Xie Benshu, “Miao Yuntai xiansheng jiazu zuji wenti zhi yanjiu,” 56–58. 17.  Yang Kecheng, “Yunnan Miao xi,” 33–34. 18.  Miao Yuntai, Miao Yuntai huiyilu, 1. 19.  Yang Kecheng, “Yunnan Miao xi,” 33–34. 20.  Miao, Miao Yuntai huiyilu, 2–7. 21.  See Liu Mei ching nien: The Journal of the Chinese Christian Students Association in North America, 71. 22.  Miao, Miao Yuntai huiyilu, 9–10, 16. 23.  Tracing Miao through the University of Minnesota system suggests that he did not graduate from the School of Mines, and his year of graduation is unclear. The university’s 1916–1917 Annual Register lists Miao as a sophomore in the School of Mines: Bulletin of the University of Minnesota: The Annual Register 1916–1917, 194. The University of Minnesota website for Chinese alumni notes that Miao transferred out of the School of Mines and graduated in 1918 with a bachelor of arts. https://china

240 Notes to Chapter 6

.umn.edu/en/alumni/distinguished-alumni/miao-yuntai. The university’s 1918–1919 address book, however, lists Miao as a student in the program in science, literature, and the arts but with a graduation year of 1919: University of Minnesota, The University Address Book, 1918–1919, 69, 125. 24.  Miao, Miao Yuntai huiyilu, 15–18. 25.  Hillman, The International Tin Cartel, 28–30, 41–42, 48–49; Miao, Miao Yuntai huiyi lu, 37–38; Hall, The Yunnan Provincial Faction, 149–159; Yu Zongze, ed., Yunnan xingzheng jishi, di’er bian, jingji, xiye, 1b–2a. The best description of the transactions bringing Gejiu tin to Hong Kong is found in the Department of Commerce and Industry Director You Yunlong’s 1923 report, YPA 77-5-238, cited in Yunnan jindai kuangye dang’an shiliao xuanbian (hereafter YJKD), 1:317–327. 26.  “Government Taking Steps to Conserve Tin,” 839. For the importance of personal consumption, including autos, in driving the global tin market, see Hillman, The International Tin Cartel, 51. 27.  Hall, The Yunnan Provincial Faction, 153; Hillman, The International Tin Cartel, 51–53 describes global tin markets from 1913 to 1918; Miao describes the impact on Gejiu in his memoir, Miao Yuntai huiyilu, 18. 28.  Barry Naughton, The Chinese Economy: Transitions and Growth, 209. 29.  Miao, Miao Yuntai huiyi lu, 19–20. 30.  Miao, Miao Yuntai huiyi lu, 20. 31.  Marshall D. Draper, “The Tin Industry of Yunnan,” 485. 32.  Miao, Miao Yuntai huiyi lu, 21–22. 33.  Miao, Miao Yuntai huiyi lu, 21–22 34.  Sutton recounts the details in Provincial Militarism and the Chinese Republic, 253. 35.  Sutton, Provincial Militarism and the Chinese Republic, 252–257; Miao, Miao Yuntai huiyi lu, 23. 36.  Shi Yun, “Fu Dian zhi meng,” 104; Miao, Miao Yuntai huiyi lu, 24–25. 37.  Miao, Miao Yuntai huiyilu, 24–25. 38.  Miao, Miao Yuntai huiyilu, 26; Shi Yun, “Fu Dian zhi meng,” 105. Yang Kecheng, “Yunnan Miao xi,” 33–34. 39.  The idea of modern Chinese history as a search is best exemplified by Jonathan D. Spence’s magisterial The Search for Modern China. 40.  Yunnansheng dang’anguan, ed., Yunnansheng dang’anguan zhinan, 124. 41.  The best place to gain insights into this complex and long-term process is Yunnansheng dang’anguan, ed., Yunnansheng dang’anguan zhinan, esp. 47–48, 60– 61, 122, 136–137, 169. Note that on p. 169, this source has the wrong date for the creation of the Jianshe ting, but has the correct date on p. 184. For a brief account of how the new government institutions were designed to conform to national standards, see Yu Zongze, ed., Yunnan xingzheng jishi, jingji, tiyao, 1b-2a.



Notes to Chapter 6 241

42.  For the responsibilities of the Department of Agriculture and Mining, see Xingzhengyuan nongcun fuxing weiyuanhui, ed., Yunnansheng nongcun diaocha, 31–32, 37–38; Yunnansheng dang’anguan, ed., Yunnansheng dang’anguan zhinan, 169, 184. 43.  Shi Yun suggests that Miao’s New York experiences influenced his approach to Yunnan development, and I agree, although, based on my evaluation, it is clear that Miao was most influenced by the creation of holding companies, the centralizing and professionalization of management, and the linkage of firms to investment capital. For Shi’s take, see “Fu Dian zhi meng,” 104–107. For the transformation of American business that influenced Miao, see Alfred D. Chandler with Takashi Hikino, Scale and Scope: The Dynamics of Industrial Capitalism, chap. 3, esp. 73–78, 80, 82. 44.  Yu Zongze, ed., Yunnan xingzheng jishi, jingji tiyao, 1b-2a. 45.  Naughton, The Chinese Economy, 299–300, 308–309, 314–315; Donald C. Clarke, “Corporate Governance in China: An Overview,” 497–498. 46.  Morris L. Bian, The Making of the State Enterprise System in Modern China: The Dynamics of Institutional Change, 77–92; Cheng Linsun, “The Industrial Activities of the National Resources Commission and Their Legacies in Communist China,” 62–63. 47.  Hall, The Yunnan Provincial Faction, 169. 48.  Hillman, The International Tin Cartel, 95, 100–136. 49.  Hillman, The International Tin Cartel, 151–152, 155. 50.  IMH 18-23-01-25-02-010, pp. 4–5, 10, 15, 16–17, 52–56, 58. These documents are copies of various 1930 records from the Gejiu Tin Company (lists of board members, an account of the founding of the company, records of shares and shareholders) contained in a packet sent from the Yunnan Jiansheting to the central Jingjibu on June 14, 1938. 51.  IMH 18-23-01-25-02-010, pp. 19–26 Yunnan Gejiu xiwu gufen youxian gongsi zhangcheng. 52.  IMH 18-23-01-25-02-010, pp. 47–48. 53.  Miao, Miao Yuntai huiyilu, 45. 54.  Draper, “The Tin Industry of Yunnan,” 489. 55.  Miao, Miao Yuntai huiyilu, 38–40 56.  Miao, Miao Yuntai huiyilu, 38–40. 57.  Wong Lin Ken, The Malayan Tin Industry to 1914, 160–166, 227–230. 58.  K. G. Tregonning, “A Brief Account of the First Seventy-Five Years of The Straits Trading Company, Limited,” 101; “China’s Tin Industry,” 10. 59.  Miao, Miao Yuntai huiyilu, 38–40; Yu Zongze, ed., Yunnan xingzheng jishi, jingji, xiye, 3b-4b, 9a-b, 10a-b. 60.  See Miao’s March 1933 report as cited in Yu Zongze, ed., Yunnan xingzheng jishi, jingji, xiye, 6b-7b.

242 Notes to Chapter 6

61.  Investors were Quanye Bank (10,000 yuan), Educational Expenditure Control Bureau (10,000), Fudian New Bank (100,000), Yunnan Tin Company (100,000), private merchants (130,000), and the provincial government (150,000). Hall, The Yunnan Provincial Faction, 149–159; Yu Zongze, ed., Yunnan xingzheng jishi, jingji, xiye 8b-9a. 62.  Yu Zongze, ed., Yunnan xingzheng jishi, jingji, xiye 10b-11a. Miao, Miao Yuntai huiyi lu, 41–43. Miao Yuntai, “Guanyu Yunnan de jingji caizheng jinrong he gongshangye gaikuang,” 127, 130–132; “Yunnan’s Tin Exports,” 9. 63.  Hall, The Yunnan Provincial Faction, 155, 159. 64.  Yang Kecheng, “Yunnan Miao xi,” 36. 65.  Shi Yun, “Long Yun zhengfu de huobi faxing zhengce,” 94–95. 66.  Hall, The Yunnan Provincial Faction, 116–117; Shi Yun, “Long Yun zhengfu de huobi faxing zhengce,” 98. 67.  For a good discussion of this complex process, see Alan Baumler, Chinese and Opium under the Republic: Worse Than Floods and Wild Beasts, chap. 6. 68.  Hall, The Yunnan Provincial Faction, 84–94, 160. 69.  Shi Yun, “Fu Dian zhi meng,” 103–104, 109; Yang Kecheng, “Yunnan Miao xi,” 40. 70.  For Fudian problems, see Shi Yun, “Fu Dian zhi meng,” 100–103. For the rise and fall of opium markets plus central government policy, see Hall, The Yunnan Provincial Faction, 116–120, 127, 130–136. 71.  Hall, The Yunnan Provincial Faction, 136–140; Baumler, Chinese and Opium under the Republic, 191–193, 212. 72.  Miao, Miao Yuntai huiyi lu, 55; Yang Kecheng, “Yunnan Miao xi,” 40; Shi Yun, “Long Yun zhengfu de huobi faxing zhengce,” 96. 73.  Shi Yun, “Fu Dian zhi meng,” 110–112. 74.  Shi Yun provides the fullest coverage of these developments from the point of view of the Fudian New Bank; see “Fu Dian zhi meng,” 112–113 and “Long Yun zhengfu de huobi faxing zhengce,” 96; Thomas McGrath also provides superb details about Miao’s use of Yunnan Tin Refinery to combat the French. Thomas E. McGrath, “Subverting the Stranglehold: The Gejiu Tin Trade and Yunnan Militarists’ Efforts to Mitigate French Economic Dominance via the Yunnan Railway, 1910–1937.” 75.  Ho Tai-kuang explains how, in Keynesian terms, the silver standard affected Chinese price stability in the 1930s. Although Ho focuses on the central regime’s currency, the same analysis applies to Yunnan. Ho, “Dilemma of the Silver Standard Economies: The Case of China,” 519. 76.  Shi Yun, “Long Yun zhengfu de huobi faxing zhengce,” 95, 97. Horesh describes how China’s terms of trade worsened because of the increasing price of silver, and this process was repeated at the provincial level in Yunnan. Niv Horesh, “Whitehall vs. Old China Hands: The 1935–36 Leith-Ross Mission Revisited,” 211. 77.  Shi Yun, “Fu Dian zhi meng,” 114–116; Hall, The Yunnan Provincial Faction, 91.



Notes to Chapter 6 243

78.  Yang Kecheng, “Yunnan Miao xi,” 41, 60. 79.  Hall, The Yunnan Provincial Faction, 147, 149, 162–163. 80.  His proposal is reproduced in Yu Zongze, ed., Yunnan xingzheng jishi, jingji, Yunnan quansheng jingji weiyuanhui, 1b-2b and in Miao Yuntai huiyilu, 68–69. The proposal was approved in the 384th resolution of the Provincial Government Conference, dated March 30, 1934. The YEC was not formally established until December 1, 1934. Unless otherwise noted, the information and translations in this and the following three paragraphs come from the proposal. 81.  This is not a neologism for Miao in the 1980s; see its use, along with state enterprise (gongying qiye), in Yu Zongze, ed., Yunnan xingzheng jishi, jingji, tiyao, 3a. 82.  Yu Zongze, ed., Yunnan xingzheng jishi, jingji, tiyao, 2b-3a (cited as Yunnan xingzheng jishi VI, tiyao 2b-3a, in Hall, 146). 83.  While not very detailed, Dong Mengxiong and Luo Qun’s short section on the YEC is one of the few publications that recognizes the breadth of Miao’s vision. Dong and Luo, “Jindai Yunnan de shiye kaituozhe he licaijia Miao Yuntai shulun,” 52–56. 84.  Yu Zongze, ed., Yunnan xingzheng jishi, jingji, tiyao, 2b, and Yunnan quansheng jingji weiyuanhui, 1a; Hall, The Yunnan Provincial Faction, 147. 85.  Yu Zongze, ed., Yunnan xingzheng jishi, jingji, Yunnan quansheng jingji weiyuanhui, 1a-b. 86.  Yu Zongze, ed., Yunnan xingzheng jishi, jingji, tiyao, 3a. 87.  Miao, Miao Yuntai huiyi lu, 71, 72, 114–117; Yu Zongze, ed., Yunnan xingzheng jishi, jingji, Yunnan quansheng jingji weiyuanhui, 7b-8a. 88.  Yu Zongze, ed., Yunnan xingzheng jishi, jingji, tiyao, 2a-b. 89.  Shi Yun, “Fu Dian zhi meng,” 117–118. 90.  Naughton, The Chinese Economy, 316–317. 91.  Hall, The Yunnan Provincial Faction, 159–169. 92.  Miao, Miao Yuntai huiyilu, 74–75. 93.  Yu Zongze, ed., Yunnan xingzheng jishi, jingji, Yunnan quansheng jingji weiyuanhui, 4a. 94.  Hall, The Yunnan Provincial Faction, 159–169; Yu Zongze, ed., Yunnan xingzheng jishi, jingji, Yunnan quansheng jingji weiyuanhui, 9a-b. 95.  Yu Zongze, ed., Yunnan xingzheng jishi, jingji, Yunnan quansheng jingji weiyuanhui, 9b-10a. 96.  Yu Zongze, ed., Yunnan xingzheng jishi, jingji, fangzhi, 1a-2a; Miao, Miao Yuntai huiyilu, 76–77; Hall, The Yunnan Provincial Faction, 159–169. The figure of “over 15 million yuan” is cited in Yu Zongze, ed., Yunnan xingzheng jishi, jingji, fangzhi 1a, although when the YEC petitioned the provincial government to build the spinning and weaving factories, the number cited was roughly 12 to 14 million. See the same source, p. 1b. 97.  Hall, The Yunnan Provincial Faction, 159–169.

244 Notes to Chapters 6 and 7

98.  Yang Kecheng, “Yunnan Miao xi,” 60. Miao, Miao Yuntai huiyilu, 78–79. 99.  For Guo Dihua’s (Taai Woot Kwok) graduation with a day class diploma course, see New Bedford Textile School, Catalogue 1927–1928, 43, and Catalogue 1930– 1931, 45. 100.  Yu Zongze, ed., Yunnan xingzheng jishi, jingji, fangzhi, 6b, 9a-b; Miao, Miao Yuntai huiyilu, 78–79. 101.  Guo Yuan, Yunnansheng jingji wenti, 108–109. 102.  Guo Yuan, Yunnansheng jingji wenti, 108–109; Miao, Miao Yuntai huiyilu, 79. 103.  See Consul General Harding’s reports on child labor and mortality at the Gejiu mines, October 15, 1934. FO 371 22151 933. 104.  Yunnansheng Mianyechu 27 nianfen gongzuo baogao. 105.  IMH 18-22-01-036-07, pp. 35–38, 46, 51–52 Jiaotong yinhang shejichu, Yunnansheng Kaiyuan Mengzi liangxian diaocha baogao (1940). 106.  Zhou Shaomo, “Dianxi biandi nongye xianzhuang ji qi fazhan de keneng,” 434–449. 107.  Zheng Youkui, Cheng Linsun, and Zhang Chuanhong, Jiu Zhongguo de ziyuan weiyuanhui—shishi yu pingjia, preface, p. 1, and regular text, 2–4, 107; Cheng Linsun, “The Industrial Activities of the National Resources Commission,” 54–55. 108.  Miao, Miao Yuntai huiyilu, 70; Yu Zongze, ed., Yunnan xingzheng jishi, jingji, Yunnan quansheng jingji weiyuan hui, 3a; Yunnan xingzheng jishi, jingji, fangzhi, 5a-6b. 109.  Zheng, Cheng, and Zhang, Jiu Zhongguo de ziyuan weiyuanhui, 47–49. 110.  Cheng, “The Industrial Activities of the National Resources Commission,” 62–63; see also Bian, The Making of the State Enterprise System, 82–86. Chapter 7 1.  Yan Hezhong, “Wuyu zegang: Yang Kecheng zhuanlue,” 61–64. 2.  Yang Kecheng, “Yunnan Miao xi difang guanliao ziben gaishu,” 42. 3.  Yang, “Yunnan Miao xi,” 60. 4.  Guo Yuan, Yunnansheng jingji wenti, 34–45. 5.  IMH 18-22-01-036-07, pp. 43–44, Jiaotong yinhang shejichu, Yunnansheng Kaiyuan Mengzi liangxian diaocha baogao (1940). 6.  Guo Yuan, Yunnansheng jingji wenti, 34–45; Yang Kecheng, “Yunnan Miao xi,” 42–52; “Fudian xin yinghang ni chengli Yunnansheng hezuo jinku cheng,” 281–282. 7.  Yang Kecheng, “Yunnan Miao xi,” 44, 48. W. C. Heinz, “The Mysterious Money Factory,” 33, 70–72. Heinz interviewed H. G. McNeary, whom the article says represented the American Bank Note Company when making a flight to Kunming in 1948 to meet with the president of the Provincial Bank of Yunnan. 8.  Shi Yun, “Fu Dian zhi meng: Minguo Yunnan jinrong fazhan de jingyan yu jiaoxun—yi Fudian yinhang, Fudian xin yinhang wei zhongxin,” 99–100.



Notes to Chapter 7 245

9.  YPA 1106-003-01523-010, Xingzhengyuan, Wei zhiding shiyebu guoji maoyiju zuzhi tiaoli ling Yunnansheng zhengfu chi zhiyou, July 23, 1931 (Minguo 20/07/23). 10.  IOR/M3/84, Political and Intelligence Reports, “Tengyueh Intelligence Report, March–August 1938”; IOR/L/PS12/2232, “Yunnan Intelligence Report, October 1937–March 1938.” 11.  YPA 1106-004-00084-010, July 4, 1938 (Minguo 27 07 04). See also the copy of the Import/Export Commission’s guidelines included in the communication from the Economic Commission to the Foreign Affairs Office, YPA 1106-004-00084-022, July 26, 1938 (Minguo 27 07 26). 12.  See, for example, YPA 1106-004-2963-001, January 1, 1938 (Minguo 27 01 01). Note that this document may be misdated. 13.  IOR/M3/84, “Tengyueh Intelligence Report, March–August 1938”; IOR/ M3/84, “Tengyue Monthly Summary, August 1938.” 14.  IOR/M3/84, “Tengyueh Monthly Summary, May 1939”; “Tengyueh Monthly Summary, December 1939”; IOR/L/PS/12/2232, “Tengyueh Intelligence Report, Half Year Ending 29 February 1940.” 15.  IOR/M3/84, “Tengyueh Monthly Summary, July 1940.” 16.  IOR/L/PS/12/2232, “Tengyueh Intelligence Report, Half Year Ending 29 February 1940.” 17.  YPA 132-3-1, pp. 101–110, Xufu (Yibin) Purchasing Office to Yunnan-Burma Raw Silk Company Board of Directors, July 23, 1939. 18.  Lloyd E. Eastman, “Regional Politics and the Central Government: Yunnan and Chungking,” 335–336. 19.  Shi Yun, “Fu Dian zhi meng,” 131–133. 20.  Miao Yuntai, Miao Yuntai huiyilu, 83–84. See also Yu Zongze, ed., Yunnan xingzheng jishi, jingji, fangzhi, 5a-b; Yang Kecheng, “Yunnan Miao xi,” 59–60. 21.  J. C. S. Hall, The Yunnan Provincial Faction, 1927–1937, 164–169; Eastman, “Regional Politics and the Central Government,” 334–335; Chi-ming Hou, “Economic Development and Public Finance in China, 1937–1945,” 205, 213. 22.  YPA 1045-001-00002-006, Chen Tongfu, “Yunnan gongren yu Yunnan gongyehua,” Jingjian tongxun, no. 4 (December 1948):4–5. 23.  IMH 18-23-00-204, “Maoweihui Yunnan fenhui zuzhi zhangze ji Diansheng chukou chanpin shougou jiehui banfa” esp. 22–25; “Yunnan duiwai maoyihui gaili Zhongyang guanli,” 2. 24.  IMH 18-23-01-25-04-005, pp. 108, 116, “Yunnan Zhongguo chayemaoyi gufen youxian gongsi zhangcheng”; “Yunnan Zhongguo chaye maoyi gufen youxian gongsi gudong mingbu.” 25.  IMH 18-23-01-25-04-005, pp. 10–16, “Yunnan Zhongguo chayemaoyi gufen youxian gongsi zhangcheng.” 26.  “Yunnansheng chaye jinchukou gongsi dashiji,” 118.

246 Notes to Chapter 7

27.  “Yunnan yixi Jinshajiang yan’an zhi shajin kuangye jianbao,” 95–99. 28.  “Yunnan yixi Jinshajiang yan’an zhi shajin kuangye jianbao,” 109. 29.  YPA 132-1-10, pp. 11–14, Touzi gukuang; YPA 132-1-10, pp. 4–10, Yunnan yunshu gongsi gudong mingbu. 30.  YPA 132-2-6, pp. 2–11, Maoheng gufen youxian gongsi zhangcheng cao’an. 31.  YPA 132-2-6, pp. 75, 79, Damao fangzhi qiye gufen youxian gongsi zhangcheng; Faqi ren mingdan. 32.  IMH 18-23-01-25-15-001, pp. 27–46, Xiaguan Yulong dianli gufen youxian gongsi gudong mingbu. 33.  For a short introduction that is focused on the Tai of Yunnan’s modern Dehong, whom he calls Tai Yai, see Yos Santasombat, Lak Chang: A Reconstruction of Tai Identity in Daikong, 1–11. 34.  Zi Lian, “Teng Miao jiaotong gaidao zhi qushi,” in Heshun Chongxinhui dijiu zhounian jiniankan (1935), 36–38. 35.  Yan Chaojie, “Minguo shiqi Dianxi tusi zhidu bianhua tanjiu—yi Nandian tusi wei li.” 36.  Yang Chaofang, “Minguo shiqi biandi Daizu tusi de guojia rentong—Jianshe Teng Long bianqu ge tusi di yishishu gaishuo,” 121–126. 37.  FO 228 3275, “Political Report for Tengyue Consular District for the Three Months Ended June 15, 1924.” 38.  FO 228 3275, “Political Report for Tengyue Consular District for the Three Months Ended September 15, 1924.” 39.  IMH 18-22-01-036-07, p. 135 Dianxi Baiyi duli sheji weiyuanhui ji tusi datongmeng Ganyai tusi bufa huodong qingxing diaochabiao. 40.  IOR/L/PS12.2232, pp. 385–386, “Tengyueh Political Report for the Three Months Ending 31 August 1933.” 41.  “Jiaxiang xiaoxi yishu,” Heshun Chongxinhui dijiu zhounian jiniankan (1935), 56–58; IOR/L/PS12/2232, “Tengyueh Intelligence Report, September 1934–February 1935.” 42.  IOR/M3/84. See the succession of reports from Tengyue in August and September 1938: “Tengyueh Monthly Summary, for July 1938,” “Tengyueh Political Summary, June–August 1938,” “Tengyueh Intelligence Report, March–August 1938.” 43.  IOR/L/PS12/2232, “Tengyueh Political Summary, September–November 1938”; Yan Chaojie, “Minguo shiqi Dianxi tusi zhidu bianhua,” 7; IOR/M3/84, “Tengyueh Political Summary, June–August 1938.” 44.  For a brief survey of saopha educations, see IMH 18-22-01-036-07, p. 142, Teng Long qu ge tusi xiankuang diaochabiao; for insights into the curriculum, see Chen Qilin, Huaqiao baojian, 1–2. Beatrix Metford met Tai elite who were educated in Burma and Japan; see Where China Meets Burma: Life and Travel in the Burma-China Border Lands, 95, 203.



Notes to Chapter 7 247

45.  IOR/M3/84, “Tengyueh Monthly Summary, October 1938.” 46.  To access these intelligence reports, see the documents collected in IMH 18-22-01-036-07, “Yunnan tusi xiankuang diaocha tubiao.” This chapter refers to individual documents within this collection. Much of the other evidence is reproduced in “Lu Han guanyu Dianxi ge tusi qingkuang gei Minzheng ting de xunling,” 99–106. 47.  IMH 18-22-01-036-07, pp. 134, 137–138, Dianxi Baiyi duli sheji weihuanhui ji tusi datongmeng Ganyai tusi bufa huogong qingqing diaochabiao”; “Dianxi Teng Long bianqu Mangshi deng tusi neimu ji yinmou huodong diaochabiao.” 48.  “Dian Chuan Kang Baiyi yunniang duli chou zu Nanchao lianbang hezhong guo.” 49.  Wang Chunqiao, “Tusi cunfei yu guojia tongyi (1944–1948),” 103–108. 50.  These charges are laid out with supporting documents by Lu Han in “Lu Han guanyu Dianxi ge tusi qingkuang gei Minzheng ting de xunling,” 99–106. 51.  “Jiu tusi cheng Zhongyang wen,” as summarized in Yang Chaofang, “Minguo shiqi biandi Daizu tusi de guojia rentong.” 52.  IOR/M3/84, “Tengyueh Monthly Summary, October 1941.” 53.  Roger V. Des Forges relates Dao Anren’s defense of Ganyai against the British in Hsi-liang and the Chinese National Revolution, 117. 54.  IMH 18-22-01-036-07, pp. 134–136, 137–138, Dianxi Baiyi duli sheji weihuanhui ji tusi datongmeng Ganyai tusi bufa huogong qingqing diaochabiao; Dianxi Teng Long bianqu Mangshi deng tusi neimu ji yinmou huodong diaochabiao. These were two reports forwarded to multiple central government ministries by the Yunnan Command. The reports were included in the Xingzhengyuan’s September 23, 1948, document labeled “Yunnan tusi diaocha tubiao.” 55.  Bertil Lintner, “The Shans and the Shan State of Burma,” 405. 56.  Sao Sanda Simms, Great Lords of the Sky: Burma’s Shan Aristocracy, 42–43. 57.  Simms, Great Lords of the Sky, 43–45. 58.  Lintner, “The Shans,” 406–407. 59.  Paragraph from Simms, Great Lords of the Sky, 66–68 and Lintner, “The Shans,” 407–408; Matthew J. Walton, “Ethnicity, Conflict, and History in Burma: The Myths of Panglong,” 895–900. 60.  “Evidence of Representatives of Supreme Council of United Hill Peoples,” in appendix I, p. 2, and “Evidence of Witnesses from the Shan States,” in appendix I, p. 23 of Report of the Frontier Areas Committee of Enquiry, 1947. For more on Hsenwi, see Simms, Great Lords of the Sky, 143. 61.  The Hsenwi family tree is in Simms, Great Lords of the Sky, 147; for marriage alliances of the Ganyai saophas, see Li Maolin, “Miandian (Mubang) yonggui tusi yu Zhongguo Dehong Ganyai (Yingjiang) tusi de yinqin guanxi shiyi,” 253. 62.  Yan Chaojie, “Minguo shiqi Dianxi tusi zhidu bianhua,” 5–9.

248 Notes to Chapter 7

63.  Dao Jingban (Dao Baotu), “Dao Jingban fouren Dianxi tusi qitu ‘duli’ de shenming,” 117–118. 64.  Wang Chunqiao, “Tusi cunfei yu guojia tongyi,” 107–108. 65.  Pan Xianlin, “ ‘Jindaihua’ lichenzhong de Dian Chuan Qian bian Yizu shehui,” 101, 103. As Pan notes, the Yi leadership elite in Kunming were proud of Yi history, but their identification with other groups did not even extend to lesser Yi clans. 66.  IMH 18-22-01-036-07, pp. 137–140, Dianxi Teng Long bianqu Mangshi deng tusi neimu ji yinmou huodong diaochabiao; IOR/M3/84, “Tengyueh Monthly Summary, October 1941.” 67.  Lu Chongren, Teng Long bianqu kaifa fang’an. 68.  For example, the NRC’s Commission for the Study of the Yunnan Economy surveyed Yunnan’s mining, industry, finance, agriculture, and trade. Personnel were recruited from the central ministries, as well as from the Yunnan government, Fudian New Bank, and the universities. Using the network of provincial government offices and Fudian New Bank branches, as well as the Office for Managing the Burma Road and the Commission for Military Affairs’ Southwest Transport Department, the investigators were able to travel around the province, and western Yunnan was one of their main areas of focus. See IMH 18-24-05-25-002-01, Yunnan gongkuang diaocha gaishu. 69.  This was a common process in the wartime years, as reported by Joseph Lawson, “Unsettled Lands: Labour and Land Cultivation in Western China during the War of Resistance (1937–1945),” 1442–1484. 70.  Zhou Shaomo, “Dianxi biandi nongye xianzhuang ji qi fazhan de keneng,” 434–449; Lu Dingheng, “Dianxi bianqu muxu shiye xianzhuang yu xiwang,” 353–365. 71.  In A Passion for Facts, Lam examines the social science and survey culture of the early twentieth century and how it “constructed and mobilized” social facts “to produce truth claims about the human world” (10–11). 72.  Lam, A Passion for Facts, 133–139. 73.  See, for example, Zhao Cunxiao, “Jingji ziliao: Baiyi shehui de nongye jingji,” 77–88. 74.  IMH 20-00-25-24-18, Guo da daibiao Li Xizhe jianyi qing choushe Dianbian kenzhi jigou kaifa Kawashan quyu. 75.  IMH 20-00-48-02, Chuan Kang Dian bianqu yiwu zhili jiahua (November 1947). 76.  For Yunnan, see IMH 20-00-25-23-04, Yunnansheng gezhong xumu qingkuang diaochabiao; for Xikang, see IMH 20-00-63-016-03, document 5 in “Bensheng xumu jingji qingkuang.” 77.  The best coverage of this narrative of suggestions for developing the region while maintaining tusi power comes from Yang Chaofang, “Minguo shiqi biandi Daizu tusi yu guojia rentong.” 78.  Yang Chaofang, “Minguo shiqi biandi Daizu tusi yu guojia rentong.”



Notes to Chapter 7 and Epilogue 249

79.  80.  81.  82.  83.  84. 

Fang Kesheng, Jianshe Teng Long bianqu ge tusi di yijianshu, 1, 11–15, 18–23. Fang Kesheng, Jianshe Teng Long bianqu ge tusi di yijianshu, 24–25. Metford, Where China Meets Burma, 99, 197, 203. Lu Chongren, Teng Long bianqu kaifa fang’an, 14–16, 18–19, 29–30, 47–49. Fang Kesheng, Jianshe Teng Long bianqu ge tusi di yijianshu, 46–53. Fang Kesheng, Jianshe Teng Long bianqu ge tusi di yijianshu, 54–55.

Epilogue 1.  Yan Hezhong, “Wuyu zegang: Yang Kecheng zhuanlue,” 61–64; William C. Kirby, “Continuity and Change in Modern China: Economic Planning on the Mainland and on Taiwan, 1943–1958,” esp. 133–135; Cheng Linsun, “The Industrial Activities of the National Resources Commission and Their Legacies in Communist China.” 2.  Robert K. Cliver, “Surviving Socialism: Private Industry and the Transition to Socialism in China, 1945–1958.” 3.  Bennis Wai-yip So, “The Policy-Making and Political Economy of the Abolition of Private Ownership in the Early 1950s: Findings from New Material,” 682–703. 4.  Lu Tingrong, “Dui zigai zao qianhou de Yongchangxiang shanghao,” 40–41. 5.  Yan Xiangcheng and Yang Hong, “Yongchangxiang duiwai maoyi lueshu,” 139. 6.  Cliver, “Surviving Socialism.” 7.  So, “The Policy-Making and Political Economy,” 702–703. 8.  Dorothy J. Solinger outlined this process at the national level in “Socialist Goals and Capitalist Tendencies in Chinese Commerce, 1949–1952,” 200–201. 9.  Tian Hong, “Yunnan dui siying shangye de shehui zhuyi gaizao,” 209. See also Tian Hong, “Kunming siying jinchukouye de shehui zhuyi gaizao,” 309. 10.  Tian Hong, “Kunming siying jinchukouye,” 309–310. 11.  Yan and Yang, “Yongchangxiang duiwai maoyi lueshi,” 139. 12.  So, “The Policy-Making and Political Economy,” 695. 13.  Yan and Yang, “Yongchangxiang duiwai maoyi lueshi,” 139. 14.  Lu Tingrong, “Dui zigai zao qianhou de Yongchangxiang,” 44–45; Yan and Yang, “Yongchangxiang duiwai maoyi lueshi,” 139. 15.  Yang Kecheng, “Yongchangxiang jianshi,” 104; Yan and Yang, “Yongchangxiang duiwai maoyi lueshi,” 139; Lu Tingrong, “Dui zigai zao qianhou de Yongchangxiang,” 46–47. 16.  Mo Chongpu and Tian Hong, “Zongshu,” 12. 17.  Lu Tingrong, “Dui zigai zao qianhou de Yongchangxiang,” 48–49; Yan and Yang, “Yongchangxiang duiwai maoyi lueshi,” 139. 18.  Yang Kecheng, “Yongchangxiang jianshi,” 104. 19.  Gu Gaorong and Yang Runcang, “Maoheng shanghao ji qi Yun Mao fangzhichang shimo,” 102–103. 20.  Gu and Yang, “Maoheng shanghao,” 104–108.

250 Notes to Epilogue

21.  Gu and Yang, “Maoheng shanghao,” 108–111. 22.  Gu and Yang, “Maoheng shanghao,” 111–116. 23.  Yan Hezhong, “Wuyu zegang,” 61–64. 24.  Dehong zhou shizhi bangongshi, ed., Zhongguo gongchandang Dehong lishi dashiji, 5. 25.  Dehong zhou, Zhongguo gongchandang, 2–5. 26.  “Yunnan shengwei guanyu Baoshan diqu fasheng weifan shaoshuminzu zhengce shijian de tongbao” (August 8, 1950), in Song Yongyi, ed., Zhongguo wushi niandai chu zhong qi de zhengzhi yundong shu ju ku: cong tudi gaige dao gongsi heying, 1949–1956. 27.  Wen-Chin Chang, Beyond Borders: Stories of Yunnanese Chinese Migrants of Burma, 5–6. 28.  “Yunnan gedi fei tehuodong qingkuang zonghe cailiao” (April 20, 1950), in Song, Zhongguo wushi niandai, 4, 8–9. 29.  Dehong zhou, Zhongguo gongchandang, 6–7. 30.  Zhang Yun, “Cong fengjian tusi dao renmin gongpu—Dehong zhou diyi ren zhouzhang Dao Jingban,” 6–7. 31.  “Yunnansheng Daizu diqu shangceng fenzi he qunzhong dui tudi gaige de fanying” (November 11, 1954), in Song, Zhongguo wushi niandai. 32.  Zhang Gengsheng, “Dianxi minzu minzhu jianzhengzhong de wenti” (November 8, 1952), in Song, Zhongguo wushi niandai. 33.  Jiang Yingliang, Baiyi de jingji shenghuo, 34. 34.  Yos Santasombat, Lak Chang: A Reconstruction of Tai Identity in Daikong, 25–26. 35.  Janet C. Sturgeon, “Governing Minorities and Development in Xishuangbanna, China: Akha and Dai Rubber Farmers as Entrepreneurs,” 323. 36.  Bjorn Gustafsson, “Ethnic Disparities in Economic Well-Being in China,” 341–363. 37.  For the Production and Construction Corps, see Nicolas Becquelin, “Staged Development in Xinjiang.” For tourism in Yunnan, see John A. Donaldson, “Tourism, Development and Poverty Reduction in Guizhou and Yunnan,” 333–351. 38.  Fang Kesheng, Jianshe Teng Long bianqu ge tusi di yijianshu. 39.  Dehong Daizu Jingpozu zizhizhou shangyeju, ed., Dehongzhou shangyezhi, 113–130. 40.  Zhang Kaishou, “Dehong requ ziyuan fenbu qingkuang yu kaifa qianjing,” 15. 41.  Yang Linxing, “Yunnan bianjiang minzu diqu de boluan fanzheng,” 269–270. 42.  Yos, Lak Chang, 33–34. 43.  Zhang Yun, “Cong fengjian tusi dao renmin gongpu,” 6–7. 44.  Jiang Yingliang, Baiyi de jingji shenghuo, 17–18. 45.  Kangding xianzhi, 176–177.



Notes to Epilogue 251

46.  Of the 237 people who worked in the trade institutions linking Dartsedo with another Kham location, Muya, for example, 182 were Han. Kangding xianzhi, 170, 172. 47.  Kangding xianzhi, 131. 48.  IMH 18-23-01-25-31-0222, Ministry of Economics response to Miao Jiaming’s December 23, 1946, petition for registering the Renmin qiye gongsi; Shi Yun, “Fu Dian zhi meng: Minguo Yunnan jinrong fazhan de jingyan yu jiaoxun—yi Fudian yinhang, Fudian xin yinhang wei zhongxin,” 151–152. 49.  IMH 18-23-01-25-31-0222, “Yunnan renmin qiye gufen youxian gongsi zhangcheng,” and “Yunnan renmin qiye gufen youxian gongsi gudong mingce”; Miao Yuntai, Miao Yuntai huiyi lu, 127. 50.  Miao Yuntai, Miao Yuntai huiyi lu, 126–127, 130, 146. 51.  Rong Yiren, “China’s Open Policy and CITIC’s Role,” 58. Emphasis added. 52.  Qin Xiao, The Theory of the Firm and Chinese Enterprise Reform: The Case of China International Trust and Investment Corporation, 94–104.

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Index

Note: Page numbers in italics refer to figures. Accountants, importance to Yunnan corporations, 45 Accounting. See Bookkeeping Achak khapa, 99, 114 Agency problem, 40–41, 47. See also Corporate governance Allen, Sarah, 222n6 American bourgeoisie, 10, 63–64, 70 Archdeacon, S. B., 157–158 Architecture, and urban change, 74–75 Association for the Advancement of Women, 88 Aung San, 185–186 Autonomy (ethnic autonomous regions), 19, 201–202, 204 Bachong, 113–114 Backwardness: as attributed to borderlands, 107, 126, 168, 202; as attributed to Kham, Khampas, and Tibet, 18, 109, 119; as attributed to minorities and minority regions, 3–6, 8, 12, 69, 187, 189; as attributed to Yunnan, 11, 141; as a rhetoric of power, 189, 202, 206; imposed by Communist Party, 200 Bai (people). See Minjia

Baiyi (pejorative term for Tai), 183, 202 Bank of China, 153, 167, 173, 177 Baohua Antimony Mining Stock Company, Ltd., 137–138, 140 Batang, 102, 105, 110–111, 114, 116 Beimu (Fritillaria thunbergii), 95, 102, 112–113, 118 Bhamo, 31, 78–79 Bianjiang xingzheng sheji weiyuanhui. See Border Administration Planning Committee Bian, Morris L., 128 Bolton, Herbert E., 11 Bookkeeping, 16, 25, 42–49, 64–65; and changes in human behavior, 43–45, 48; and Communist Party investigations, 197; and conquering distance, 26, 46–47, 49, 196; and disciplining workforce, 47–48; history of in Yunnan, 43–44. See also New Accounting History Booz, Patrick, 99, 111, 114 Border Administration Planning Committee (Bianjiang xingzheng sheji weiyuanhui), 188–189, 191 Borderlands, 4, 8, 10; and conscripted labor, 175; Chinese perceptions of,

275

276 Index

108–110; efforts to impose direct rule over, 14–15, 106–110, 116, 131, 133; history of, 9, 11–12; treated differently than China proper, 115, 141 Brick tea. See Tea British: invasion of Lhasa, 99, 110, 139; reliance on Yunnanese, 31 Burma: and trade with Yunnan, 26, 29–30, 71–72, 78–79; and Yunnanese migrants, 17, 30–31, 81–82; British conquest of, 31, 80, 129, 133; colonial government of, 2; independence movement and influence on Tai, 2, 184, 185–186; influence on Yunnanese merchants, 12, 17, 67–68, 82, 85–87, 90; Nationalist troops in, 201. See also Shan States Burma Corporation (mining), 72 Burma Road, 173, 175, 182, 198 Burmese women, 50, 82 Business history, 9, 127 Cantonese, in Burma, 67–68, 79, 82 Carlowitz, 138, 140 Caterpillar fungus (chongcao), 27, 95, 102, 112 Cen Chunxuan, 107–108 Central government, 153, 160, 162, 174– 175, 177–179. See also Nationalist government Cen Yuying, 7, 126, 128–129, 132–134, 180, 206 Chan Wan (Changhua) Chinese School, 84–85 Chatreng (Xiangcheng), 105, 110 Chen Yanbin, 35 Chettiars, 73 China International Trust and Investment Corporation. See CITIC China Merchants’ Steamship Company, 127, 134–135 China proper (neidi), 2, 12, 102–104, 106, 115, 127 China Tea Company (Zhongguo chaye gongsi), 196–197 Chongcao. See Caterpillar fungus

CITIC (Zhongguo guoji touzi xintuo gongsi), 208 Coales, Oliver, 101, 103 Collins, William, 137–138 Colonialism, 99, 103, 110, 117, 139 Commercialization, and impact on Southwest China, 25, 28 Commission for Managing Yunnan’s Imports and Exports (Imports and Exports Commission), 175, 178, 195 Communist Party, 3, 6, 11–12, 16; and People’s Liberation Army invasion of Tai domain, 200; and policy of aiding private corporations, 194; and representation of minorities, 189; in Kham, 95–97, 118; relations with indigenous elite, 200–202 Companies. See Corporations Company Law, 9, 125, 138, 154, 156, 163, 209 Confucianism: and ahistorical stereotypes of Chinese business, 16, 34–35, 41, 47–48; and business ethics, 42; and education, 84, 89; and modernization in Xiamen, 68, 89; and Yunnan merchant culture, 63–64; rejection of by progressive merchants, 67, 89–92 Contract system, 194–196, 198 Cornell, Stephen, and Joseph Kalt, 5 Corporate governance, 9, 16, 39–40; and ethnicity, 34–37; of CITIC, 208; of Yunnanese private corporations, 31–42; of Yunnan state-run corporations, 154–156, 163, 168–169, 208–209 Corporations: and bankruptcy, 72; and control of commerce, 3, 6, 18, 97; and kinship, 9, 34–37, 39–40; and profit-sharing, 16, 40–42, 48; and shareholding partnerships, 6, 9, 27, 32–42; and take-over by Communist Party, 11, 197; apprenticeship programs of, 59; as agents of disempowerment, 119, 179, 202–203; definition of, 8–9; expansion into Kham, 98, 111, 114; impact on



families, 16, 53, 57–65; run by Han, 16, 32, 114; run by Minjia, 16, 32, 114; sources of credit, 72–73; Yunnanese, 7–8, 16, 23–25, 29–30. See also State-owned enterprise Cotton: cultivation of in Yunnan, 166–167, 172–173; state control over supply, 195 Credit, for farmers, 172–173 Culp, Robert J., 83 Cultural Revolution, 205–206 Cun Haiting, 7, 77, 78, 82, 87; and 1911 Revolution in Yunnan, 79–81; and education, 84 Cun Shichang, 63, 224n30 Dai. See Tai Dalai Lama, 109, 111, 204 Dali, 24, 36, 59, 83, 129 Danba. See Drakteng Dao Anren, 3, 7, 84, 139, 183–184; and Revolutionary Alliance, 80, 181 Dao Baotu (Dao Jingban): and Chinese state violence, 181–182; and Tai autonomy, 91, 186–187, 190, 204; charges of separatism against, 184, 187; death of during Cultural Revolution, 205; leadership within Dehong, 204; relations with Communist Party, 200–201 Dao Chengyue, and Tai autonomy, 183–185, 187 Dartsedo (Kangding), 97–100, 102, 116, 118 Dehong Autonomous Region, 201–202, 204 Deng Xiaoping, 207–208 Des Forges, Roger, 139, 213n5 Development. See Economic development Dian Mian shengsi gongsi. See YunnanBurma Raw Silk Company Disempowered development, 3, 5–7, 13, 16, 19, 98, 202, 204–206; as defined by Andrew Martin Fischer, 5, 97, 213n6; in Kham, 115, 119; in western Yunnan, 187, 189, 191–192 Drakteng, 95–97, 112, 116, 118

Index 277

Draper, Marshall D., 151–152, 157 Eastern Tibet. See Kham Economic development: and control of borderlands, 8, 10, 14, 18, 115–118, 182, 204; and ethnic inequality, 3–4, 10, 96–98, 205; as civilizing tool, 187–189; in Southwest China, 71–72; plans proposed by Tai elite, 1–3, 181; plans for western Yunnan, 188; state-led, 138, 147, 168–170, 192 Economic Life of the Baiyi, The, 202 Education: and Chinese identity, 68; for borderlands minorities, 84, 90–91, 142; for girls, 12, 17, 83; in Burma, 17, 82; in Yunnan, 17; reform of in China, 83–85 Ethnicity, 8; and border security, 188; and Communist Party policy, 200; and conflict, 2, 4; changing official categories of, 14 Exports, state management of, 175–176 Fang, I-chieh, 63 Fang Kesheng, 2, 7, 10, 19; development plans proposed in Ideas, 1–3, 12, 190– 192, 204; exile of, 19, 205; opposition to People’s Liberation Army, 200 Feet, natural, 87 Firms. See Corporations Fischer, Andrew Martin, 5, 97–98 Fitzgerald, C. P., 35–36 Fuchunheng, 32, 41, 45, 73 Fudian New Bank, 159–161, 172–173 Gambling, 50, 69, 87 Ganden Phodrang. See Dalai Lama Ganyai (Tai domain), 1, 3, 180, 182 Gejiu, 136 Gejiu Tin, 138–140, 149–152, 155–159, 161, 177 Gejiu xiwu gufen youxian gongsi. See Gejiu Tin Gender: and consumption, 62; and merchant families, 17, 54, 63 Genealogy, and invention of lineage, 35, 54, 58

278 Index

Geography: and inequality, 4, 202; and knowledge, 109; and segregation, 104 Golas, Peter J., 237n56 Gong Shou: arrest of by Yunnan government, 182; relations with Communist Party, 200, 204 Gongsi heying (state-private management), 197, 199 “Good Words for Commerce” (Shangye liangyan), 59, 64 Great Depression, 71, 73, 162 Great Western Development Program, 3 Greenfield, Liah, 53 Guandu shangban (state-supervised joint-stock companies), 9, 115, 134 Guizhou Province, and economic development, 6 Guo, Qitao, 63 Guo Dihua, 165–166 Guo (Kwok) family, 153, 165–166, 173 Guo Le (Kwok Luo), 166 Guozhuang. See Achak khapa Gustafsson, Bjorn, 4, 214n7 Hall, John C. S., 18, 124, 155 Han, 1–4; and economic power, 5; and conflict with Tai, 182; migrants to borderlands, 4, 188, 204; presumed superiority of, 107, 202 Han culture, and business organization, 34 Hard budget constraints, 150–151, 155 Harvard Business School, 171 Heqing, 24, 32, 102; and bookkeeping, 45 Heshun, 23–24, 50, 53; and education reform, 85, 88–92; and lineages, 56–58, 68; and merchant houses, 76, 77; and Modern Study Society (Xianxinshe), 80; and normalization of merchant life, 65 Heshun Caravan Museum, 43 Heshun Chongxin Association, 85, 87–92; opposition of to Tai elites, 91, 109, 181 Heshun Library, 92

High Qing (1660–1799), and historiography, 54 History of capitalism, 9, 12 Hokkien, in Burma, 67–68, 82, 85 Hong Kong, 16, 26, 72, 74, 138, 150, 159 Hou Miaomiao, 45 Hsenwi (Tai domain in Burma), 186 Hsu, Francis L. K., 36, 56, 58, 76, 92 Huaqiao baojian, 81–82 Hui. See Muslim Chinese Hyman, Louis, 12 Ideas (Ideas for Developing the Tusi Lands of the Teng Long Border Region, Jianshe Teng Long bianqu ge tusi di yijianshu). See Fang Kesheng Idema, Wilt S., 51, 222n3 Identity: Chinese, 17, 68, 90; Han, 35, 54; Minjia, 35–36 Imperialism: and impact on borderlands, 109–110; Qing informal imperialism in Korea, 132 Imports and Exports Commission. See Commission for Managing Yunnan’s Imports and Exports Imports, state management of, 175–176, 195 India, 74, 102 Indigenous (non-Han) elites: as legitimate powerholders within the Qing empire, 13, 104–105, 108; efforts to delegitimize and eradicate, 6, 14, 18, 98, 103, 106–110, 118, 139, 142, 181–182, 187 Indochina. See Vietnam Inequality. See Economic development International Tin Committee, 156 Internment, of Kazakhs and Uyghurs, 12 Irrawaddy Flotilla Company, 31 Jiang Yingliang, 202 Jianshe Teng Long bianqu ge tusi di yijianshu. See Fang Kesheng, Ideas Jia Zhiwei, 43, 51 Jingpo. See Kachin Joyce, Patrick, 10, 127, 168, 178



Kachin, 69, 173, 182, 186, 201, 204; categorized as Jingpo in China, 14; Han merchant efforts to “evolve” both Kachin and Tai, 90, 181 Kaiping Coal Mines, 127, 134 Kalt, Joseph. See Cornell, Stephen Kangding. See Dartsedo Kham, 8, 18, 27, 95, 99, 188–189; collection of medicines in, 112–115, 206; Ganden Phodrang governance of, 111; Han migration to, 97, 112, 114, 118–119; imagined as colonial territory, 117–118; Qing governance of, 104–105, 110–111; representations of by Chinese elite, 109–110; state control of commerce and resources in, 115–119, 205–206 Khampas, 8, 18; and collection of medicines, 113–115; businesses run by, 114, 119, 203; elite rulers (kings) of, 97–98, 103, 105 Kim, Nanny, 29 Kings (gyelpo), 97, 105 Kinzley, Judd, 4, 10, 128, 168, 178, 215n34 Köll, Elisabeth, 9 Kunming, 67, 74–75 Kwok family. See Guo family Labor, and working conditions, 166 Lam, Tong, 109, 213n4 Lao She, description of Xizhou, 37, 93 Lee, James Z., 28–29 Leibold, James, 107 Li, Yi, 17, 52, 68 Liang Qichao, 83, 107, 126 Li Genyuan, 137, 148, 152, 181 Lijiang, 26–27, 83, 101–102 Li Jingtian, 32–33, 40, 65 Li Mi, 201 Limited liability, 32, 137, 138, 179 Lin’an Company. See Yunnan Syndicate Lineage: and corporate governance, 34, 37–38; as invented tradition for Bai (Minjia) merchant families, 35–37; as invented tradition for Han

Index 279

merchant families, 54, 56–58, 63, 65; rejection of, 66–68, 88, 93; rituals of, 56 Lineage temples, 36, 56–58, 57, 58, 65 Litang, 102, 105, 110, 116, 119 Liu Changyou, and dream of mechanized mining in Yunnan, 129–131, 206 Liu Kunyi, and state-controlled development in non-Han regions, 115 Liu Wenhui, 116–117 London Metal Exchange, 150, 157–159, 162 Longxing gongsi. See Yunnan Syndicate Long Yun, 7, 15–16, 123–124, 145–146, 152–153 Lu Chongren, 145, 147, 178; and plans for disempowered development in Tai regions, 187–191 Lufrano, Richard, 56 Lu Mian Tengqiao yuekan, 86 Luo Qun, 30 Macauley, Melissa, 8 Mandalay, 17, 30, 39, 54, 82, 84–85, 173–174; demimonde of, 50, 54; Yunnanese population of, 78 Mangshi (Tai domain), 1, 167, 180, 191–192, 200 Maoheng: and competition with state-run firms, 176, 178; and state regulation, 175–177, 197; building of Yun Mao Textile Factory, 33, 198–199; corruption case of during Three-Antis Movement, 193, 196, 199; decision to submit to state-private management (gongsi heying), 199; disarticulation of its businesses, 198; growth and expansion of, 74, 102, 118; incorporated as investment firm, 39, 179–180; origins as shareholding partnership, 33, 38, 74; relationship with Miao Yuntai, 125, 173, 179; use of contract system after 1949, 198 May Fourth Movement, as inspiration for Yunnan merchants, 67, 85–86

280 Index

Medicine: collection of in Kham, 112–115; profits from, 113–114; traditional medicine ingredients, 33, 95–96, 102 Meng Zang weiyuanhui. See Mongolia and Tibet Commission Merchant associations (huiguan), 68, 82 Merchants: and consumption, 17, 52–53, 61–62; and education reform, 17, 69, 83–92, 174; and efforts to acculturate Kachin and Tai, 90–91; and gender, 17, 62–63; and mobility, 17, 54–55; and reform movements, 69, 86, 88–92; and revolution, 79–81; and self-representation, 10, 12, 37–38, 70, 74–77; of Shanghai, 9, 63, 70; Tibetan, 105, 114. See also Minjia Miao Jiaming. See Miao Yuntai Miao Jiashou, older brother of Miao Yuntai, 148, 152 Miao Yuntai (Y. T. Miao), 7, 17, 123– 125, 144, 146, 173; and selective adaptation of mechanized mining technology, 18, 142, 151–152, 157–159, 168; and stabilization of Yunnan currency, 161–162; and state control of private corporations, 19, 175–176, 178, 197; and Yunnan Economic Commission and its enterprises, 155, 158, 161–166, 207; as banker in Shanghai, 153; as board member of CITIC, 208; as consultant to National Resources Commission, 169; belief in state-led development, 162–163; education in U.S., 148–149, 168, 239n23; exile, 19, 207; influence of American corporations on, 12, 18– 19, 154, 163; management of Gejiu Tin, 149–152, 155–159, 168; possible influence on post-1979 reforms, 12, 20, 125, 208–209; profit-oriented approach to state-run corporations, 19, 147, 150–151, 155, 158, 163, 168–170, 207; view of Yunnan as backward, 12, 69, 147 Mining: and imperialism, 132, 136; and sovereignty, 140–141; as tool for

state-led development and civilizing, 126, 141–142; in Kham, 115–116; modern mechanized, 8, 10, 18, 116, 129–130, 134–135; of gold, 117; of tin, 72, 135–138; traditional techniques of, 136 Minjia, 14; acculturation and passing as Han, 37, 54, 56, 93; and education, 83; controversies over identity, culture, and classification as Bai, 34–36; formation and running of businesses, 16, 32, 37, 40; kinship practices of, 36–37; language of, 35–36. See also Identity. Minzu, 14. See also Ethnicity Minorities, 3–4, 6, 184 Modernity, Yunnanese visions of, 17, 69, 77 Modern Study Society (Xianxinshe): and education of Tai, 84; and study of revolutionary thinkers, 80 Monasteries (Tibetan Buddhist), 99, 100, 105, 114, 119 Mongolia, 108, 184 Mongolia and Tibet Commission (Meng Zang weiyuanhui), joint venture with the Yunnan provincial government, 178 Mongols, 104, 108 Mule trains (caravan companies), 23, 24, 102 Muli, 117 Mullaney, Thomas S., 14 Musk, 27, 96, 99, 112, 206 Muslim Chinese (Hui), 83, 101. See also Panthay Rebellion Nandian (Tai domain), 1, 142, 180, 182 Napier, Christopher J., 46, 48 National Classification Project, 35 Nationalism, 15, 35, 82, 90, 140 Nationalist government (Guomindang), 16, 173, 187. See also Central government National Resources Commission (NRC, Ziyuan weiyuanhui): and differences from Yunnan Province in approach



to state-run corporate governance, 19, 125, 147, 155, 168–170; Economics Research Division (Jingji yanjiushi), 178–179; influence on post-1949 state enterprise system, 207; investment in Yunnan corporations, 177–178 New Accounting History, 46, 48, 217n1 New curriculum (xinxuezhi), 84–85, 90 New Tengchong Society (Xin Tengchong she), 85–86, 88, 199; and condemnation of traditional marriage, 89 New Xizhou, 86 Notar, Beth Ellen, 36 Nyarong (Zhandui), 108 Opium, 31, 69, 87; and addiction, 50–51; and Yunnan currency, 160–161; taxes on, 182 Opium War, and historiography, 55 Pack trains. See Mule trains Panglong Agreement, 186 Panthay Rebellion, 27, 128–129 Pan Xianlin, 145, 187 Peldengyel, 7, 95–97, 113, 118, 205–206 Peng Yongchang, 26–27 People’s Liberation Army (PLA), 200–201 Poverty, and ethnicity, 3–6, 202 Production and Construction Corps, and Han control in Xinjiang, 204 Qing empire: and approaches to governing ethnically diverse regions, 14, 98, 103–104, 108, 131; war with France 132–133 Qingnian baojian (“Precious Mirror for Youth”). See Yangwendun Qingyi bao, 110 Race, 82, 90–91, 107 Railway, from Haiphong to Kunming, 71, 74, 136–137, 198 Rangoon, 31, 54 Redemptive societies. See Tongshanshe Revolutionary Alliance, 66–67, 80

Index 281

Rong Yiren, 208 Sadan, Mandy, 98 Saophas (lords of the sky, Tai hereditary princes in western Yunnan), 1, 3, 7, 10, 80, 142, 180–181, 213n2; accused of seeking independence, 184; opposition to Chinese state policies, 19, 91, 182; plans for autonomy (self-governance), 19, 183–184, 187, 190, 200; plans for reform and development, 181, 183, 190–192, 203–204; relations with Communist Party, 200–201, 205; representation of as feudal or tribal, 189, 202; transnational connections of, 12, 183, 185–186, 202 Shaanxi merchants: decline of, 111; in Kham, 99–101, 103, 105, 113 Shanghai, 12, 18, 32, 54, 62, 75–76, 85–86; merchant culture of, 10, 61, 63–64, 70 Shanghao (trading firm). See Corporation Shan States, 1–2, 180; as model for Yunnan Tai regions, 91, 185–187. See also Burma Shanxi province banks, as model for Yunnan corporations, 41, 47, 197 Shi Cilu, 41, 73 Shih, Chih-yu, 6 Shi Yun, 124–125, 163, 167, 241n43, 242n74 Sichuan elites, and efforts to make Kham and Tibet imaginable, 109–110 Sichuan-Kham Defense Force, 111, 116 Sichuan-Yunnan Frontier Affairs Commission (Chuan Dian bianwu dachen), 103 Silk: exports of, 26–27, 30, 39, 71, 212; mechanized reeling of, 73 Social Darwinism, 107 South Asia, 26–27 Southeast Asia, 8, 26–27 Southwest China, commercial growth in, 28–29, 53, 64

282 Index

Sovereignty, 14, 106, 108, 130, 133, 199 State, and control over natural resources, 115–117, 126, 138, 192 State-building, 8, 9, 10, 98, 128 State-owned Assets Supervision and Administration Commission (SASAC), 164, 209 State-owned enterprises (SOEs, post-1949), 5, 10, 20, 154–155; and competition with private Yunnan corporations, 195–197 State-run corporations (pre-1949), 6, 7; and competition with private firms, 176; in Kham, 18, 99, 115–117; in Yunnan Province, 8–9, 18. See also Miao Yuntai Sturgeon, Janet, 202 Sudebilege (Shirnuut Sodbilig), 106 Sun Yat-sen, 80, 181 Surveys: and selective presentation of facts, 189; of land, commodities, and people, 109, 117, 134, 182, 189 Sutton, Donald S., 79, 81 Tai (people), 1, 69, 87, 213n2; and development projects, 167, 173; and education, 84, 191; categorization of as Dai in China, 14; elite rulers (princes) of, 1–3, 7, 13; and Communist Party, 201; Han merchant efforts to “evolve” Tai, 90, 93; labeled as separatists, 2, 182; representations of, 109, 187. See also Saophas Taiwan Province, 131 Tang Jiyao, 15, 144–145, 148–149, 152 Tea: production in Yunnan, 111; sales to Kham and Tibet, 27, 99, 100, 102–103, 111–113, 118; state control of trade, 178, 196–197 Telegraph, as tool of business, 73, 158 Tengchong, 23–24, 32, 54; and education reform, 88–91; uprising against Qing, 80 Tengchong Expatriate Monthly (Lu Mian Tengqiao yuekan), 82 Teng Long (Tengchong Longling region), 1, 176, 180, 188, 201

Three-Antis Campaign/Movement, 193, 196, 199 Thum, Rian, 12 Tibet, 3–5, 109–110, 131, 139; shipping of tea to, 27, 103, 111, 178, 194, 196 Tibetans, 14, 184; and economic marginalization, 97; as merchants, 99, 105, 114; portrayals of in media, 109–110 Tin: global demand for, 136, 144; grading system for, 150; production volumes in Yunnan, 211, refining of, 138–140, 150. See also Mining Tongshanshe, 89–90 Tourism, as economic development strategy, 3, 6, 204 Transport labor (‘u lag), 116–117 Turner, Frederick Jackson, 11 Tusi. See Indigenous elites ‘U lag. See Transport labor United States: Native American reservations, 5; Silver Purchase Act (1934), 161 Uyghurs, 12, 109, 184, 204 Vietnam, 74, 129; French colonial regime in, 131–132 Wa (people), 141–142 Wang Chunqiao, 187 Wang Shaoyan, 179, 198–199 Wang Wenhao, 169 Wang Zhenyu, 173, 179, 198 Weber, David J., 11 Weber, Max, 53 Wei Yuan, 106 World War II, 7, 19, 174 Wright, Tim, 71 Wu, David Y. H., 35 Wu, Shellen Xiao, 126 Xiaguan, 30, 111, 178 Xikang Province, 117–118 Xiliang, 137–140, 180–181 Xinjiang, 3–4, 12, 104; and changing concepts of state authority, 106–107,



128, 130–133; and state-controlled economic development, 5, 10, 204 Xinmin congbao, 110 Xizhou, 24, 34, 36, 45, 171; and education reform, 83, 85, 92; and lineages, 56–58, 199–200 Xufu (Yibin), 26, 177 Yan Baocheng, 37–38, 39 Yang Fa’en, 51 Yang Hongchun, 26–27, 33–34, 45 Yang Kecheng, 7, 33–34, 44, 73, 171, 172, 174; and announcement of corruption in his brother’s corporation, 193; and Miao Yuntai, 125, 172; and rural economic development, 165, 192; as liaison to private corporations, 180; Rightist label applied to, 199 Yangwendun (Yangwendun xiaoyin, “Precepts for Yangwendun”), 30, 50–51, 59–65, 87; dating of, 52 Yangwendun xiaoyin. See Yangwendun Yan Xiangcheng, 196–197 Yan Xiecheng, 193–194, 197 Yan Zizhen, 7, 26–27, 33–34, 37, 171; and courtyard homes, 37, 38, 44–45, 61, 76 Yeh, Emily, 4–5, 96–98 Yi (people), 145, 147, 187 Yibin, 197. See also Xufu Yin Chunxiao, 51 Yin Kangping, 51 Yin Wenhe, 51–52, 218–219n18 Yong’an Textile Manufacturing Company, 165, 173 Yongchangxiang: and competition with state-run firms, 176, 178, 195–197; changing business strategy of, 180, 194–197; corporate governance of, 40–42, 45; corruption case of during Three-Antis Movement, 193; expansion of, 73–74, 102, 111–113, 118; origins as shareholding partnership, 26–27, 32–34, 37–39; state regulation of, 175–177, 197; submission to state-private management (gongsi heying) and

Index 283

disarticulation of, 197–198 Yongmaohe, 30, 32–33 Yu Dian Textile Mill, 177, 194 Yun Mao Textile Mill, 194, 198–199; renamed Kunming Textile Mill after gongsi heying, 199 Yunnan Army, 15, 81, 145; decline of, 144, 152; invasion of Sichuan and Kham, 111 Yunnan-Burma Raw Silk Company (Dian Mian shengsi gongsi), 176–177, 194 Yunnan Economic Commission (YEC), 155, 162–169, 171, 179; as foundation for industrialization after 1949, 194 Yunnanese, migration to Burma, 30, 67–68, 72, 77–79 Yunnan fangzhichang gufen youxian gongsi. See Yunnan Textile Stock Company Yunnan General Trading Company (Yunnansheng maoyi zonggongsi), 194–195 Yunnan Import and Export Corporation, and competition with private trade corporations, 195–196 Yunnan jingji weiyuan hui. See Yunnan Economic Commission Yunnan kuangwu zhaoshangju (Bureau for Recruiting Merchant Investment in Yunnan Mining). See Yunnan Mining Yunnan Military Academy, 111, 148 Yunnan Mining, 134–135 Yunnan Province: and economic development, 5–6; and state-run corporations, 5, 168–170; and rural development, 166–167, 172–173; autonomy of, 175; brief history of, 8, 13–16; Communist occupation of, 193; currency of, 144–145, 160–162, 174–175; industrialization of, 11, 18, 128, 178; provincial government of, 9, 15, 145–146, 153–154 Yunnansheng maoyi zonggongsi. See Yunnan General Trading Company Yunnan Syndicate (Anglo-French mining venture), 136–138

284 Index

Yunnan Tea Corporation, 178, 194 Yunnan Textile Stock Company, 165–166, 173, 194 Yunnan Tin (Yunnan xiye gongsi), 177, 194 Yunnan Tin Refining Company, 158–159, 161, 177 Zelin, Madeleine, 32–33, 215n27

Zhao Erfeng, 7, 18, 103, 106, 110–112, 115–116, 139 Zhongguo chaye gongsi. See China Tea Company Zhongguo guoji touzi xintuo gongsi. See CITIC Zhou Zhisheng, 34–35, 61 Zuo Zongtang, 7, 106–107, 130–132, 180, 191, 206