List of Maps, Tables, and Figures
Acknowledgments
Introduction
1. Coastal Commerce and Imperial Legacies: Smuggling and
Interdiction in the Treaty Port Legal Order
2. Tariff Autonomy and Economic Control: The Intellectual Lineage
of the Smuggling Epidemic
3. State Interventions and Legal Transformations: Asserting
Sovereignty in the War on Smuggling
4. Shadow Economies and Popular Anxieties: The Business of
Smuggling in Operation and Imagination
5. Economic Blockades and Wartime Trafficking: Clandestine
Political Economies Under Competing Sovereignties
6. State Rebuilding and New Smuggling Geographies: Restoring and
Evading Economic Controls in Civil War China
7. Old Menace in New China: Symbiotic Economies in the Early
People’s Republic
Conclusion
Character List
Notes
Bibliography
Index
Philip Thai is associate professor of history and Asian studies and director of the Asian Studies Program at Northeastern University.
An exemplar of everything that scholarship on modern Chinese
history can be. . . . China’s War on Smuggling is a richly
researched and well-argued tour de force. It links the macro to the
micro, the domestic to the transnational, and the regional to the
longer trajectory of modern China’s state building. Economic,
institutional, and legal historians will all find much to like, and
this volume will deservedly find its place on many a syllabus and
many a bookshelf.
*American Historical Review*
Philip Thai skillfully explores how smuggling remade the Chinese
state by enabling it to establish better protection of its borders
and its revenues and by standardizing regulations; he also examines
the ways that political and economic disruptions constantly
challenged this process. Thai weaves together a creative
combination of social, political, economic, and legal history,
ranging from a sophisticated technical discussion of tariff
autonomy to a clever explication of the visual representation of
smuggling in the public imagination of 1930s China. The combination
of a broad theme—illicit economic activities interacting with state
power—with many smaller case studies of smuggling incidents brings
the story alive.
*Elisabeth Köll, University of Notre Dame*
Breaking chronological and geographic conventions, this important
book places Nationalist-period state-building and the struggle for
sovereignty in a framework of the long-term growth of
infrastructural state power in China. By linking the rise of
policing, legal regulation of production and consumption, and
government intrusion in the economy with the operation of markets
and economic life, Philip Thai accomplishes the remarkable feat of
a fresh perspective on China from the bottom to top.
*Brett Sheehan, University of Southern California*
Thai makes important contributions across the fields of Qing,
Republican, and PRC history, and his book will be required reading
for scholars and students of late imperial and modern China.
*Journal of Asian Studies*
A well-researched and finely written first book by a historian
well-versed in modern Chinese history as well as smuggling and
state-building in a wider range of historical contexts.
*Journal of Social History*
China’s War on Smuggling is a fascinating study of the complicated
links between tariff policy, smuggling, and the development of the
modern Chinese state. . . . Thai’s book will be of interest to
economic and fiscal historians, but also to those concerned with
how the Chinese state was able to strengthen its capacity to
control markets and trade.
*The Economic History Review*
Thai provides a fresh, insightful take on the development of the
modern state during a period of dramatic change and challenges.
China’s War on Smuggling will appeal to those interested in the
history of commerce, law, and criminology in modern China.
*New Books in East Asian Studies*
Highly recommended.
*Choice*
His work will be of interest for both historians and scholars of
Chinese studies, especially those who seek to understand how
defiance and repression shaped and reshaped state power in
China.
*Strategic Analysis*
A remarkable history of the Chinese state’s war against coastal
smuggling from the mid-nineteenth through the mid-twentieth
centuries.
*Criminal Law and Criminal Justice Books*
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