Chinas War on Smuggling: Law, Economic Life, and the Making of the Modem State, 1842-1965.

• Author: Lin, Mao

Thai, Philip. Chinas War on Smuggling: Law, Economic Life, and the Making of the Modem State, 1842-1965. New York: Columbia University Press, 2018.

The study of state building has been one of the most prominent themes of the scholarship of modern Chinese history for the past decade. Philip Thai's book, China's War on Smuggling, is the latest and a much-welcomed contribution to this historiographical trend. While scholars typically focus on issues traditionally associated with state building such as the development of modern bureaucracies, Thai offers a fresh approach by examining the successive Chinese regimes' efforts to battle against smuggling, "focusing on the expanded use of coercive policies and policing to discipline consumption, production, and exchange--the very imperatives that drove the fight against smuggling" (3).

Drawing upon a wide range of archival sources, especially records from the Chinese Maritime Customs Service and its successor, the China General Customs Administration, Thai argues that "the fight against smuggling was not simply a minor law enforcement issue but a transformative agent in expanding state capacity, centralizing legal authority, and increasing government reach over economic life" (3). Covering the time period from the last decades of the Qing dynasty to the early years of the People's Republic of China, the book shows that smuggling and its suppression had indeed been a long-term issue underlining China's struggle to establish a modern state with complete sovereignty over its territories, despite the numerous regime changes between 1842 and 1965. Thai argues that the problem of smuggling reflected the "dialectical" relationship between two developments in modern China, "the gradual extension of state authority into the economy and the unceasing resistance to such official intrusions" (4). Accordingly, the book examines both the changing anti-smuggling policies across different historical eras and how smuggling was practiced on the ground. "[S]tates certainly made smuggling," Thai claims, "but smuggling also remade states" (11).

The book begins with a survey of the treaty port economy during the last decades of the Qing dynasty. Thai regards the Qing governments effort to fight smuggling as one of the regime's survival strategies in a new age dominated by Western powers. But two factors effectively limited the Qing regime's antismuggling efforts. On the one hand, extraterritoriality made foreigners...