China's vast and diverse borderlands have long been associated with the image of backwardness, poverty, and isolation, with the ethnic minorities inhabiting them perceived as “lag[ging] behind the Han” (p. 4). Yunnan in the Southwest is no exception. How and why this spatial and ethnic pattern of inequality came about, what it implicated for China's modern development at large, and what role private and state corporations played in instigating and perpetuating such inequality are the historical questions that C. Patterson Giersch explores in his brilliant new monograph. Placing the borderlands at the center of analysis, the book traces the development of corporations in Yunnan at the intersection of southwest China, Burma, and Kham of eastern Tibet and illuminates the important interconnections between business expansion and state-making.
Giersch examines British archives from Burma and India, Republican-era Yunnan archives, and a set of local sources ranging from lineage genealogies, rhymed ballads, didactic texts, and periodicals to business ledgers and survey reports. The rich source base allows Giersch to examine Yunnan's economic development from multiple perspectives and bring to the foreground an array of actors—merchants, entrepreneurs, technocrats, indigenous elites, provincial officials, warlords—who functioned as crucial agents in the formation of a regional history transformed by commercialization and industrialization.
The term “corporate conquests” in the title has a double meaning. It indicates, on the one hand, the corporations’ conquest of China's non-Han borderlands by integrating them into the transregional and global trade networks and capital markets and, on the other, the state's conquest of corporations through control over ownership and management of material and human resources. Giersch tells a compelling story of marginalization and “disempowered development” of minority communities, which were embedded in the economic, political, and cognitive configurations of modern China (p. 5). The disempowerment, as Giersch argues, was rooted in an “assemblage” of ideas, practices, and institutions spanning the late Qing, Republican, and communist eras (p. 10). It began with the implementation of direct governance in the borderlands that replaced the pluralistic policy of cooperating with indigenous elites, which was followed by the expansion of the state, market, and migrants in subsequent eras. Such practices and institutions were distinctively “colonial” as they not only denied indigenous communities access to resources and power but also inculcated a vision of borderlands people as “backward” and in need of “civilization,” thereby transforming the borderlands into a colonial space for sustaining the state control of trade, land, and resources (p. 111).
Part 1 of the book focuses on the growth and expansion of private corporations against the backdrop of transborder trade and migration in the nineteenth century. Chapter 1 traces the evolution of Han and Minjia (Bai) private firms that flourished in the Sino-Burmese trade and illustrates how innovative institutions such as shareholding partnerships, bookkeeping techniques, and managerial practices—more than Confucian family values and lineage formation—reshaped business behaviors and relationships and paved the way for the commercial boom in the Southwest. Chapter 2 depicts the everyday life of Yunnanese merchants who dominated the transborder trade and illuminates how commerce, consumption, and mobility transformed families and communities and reconfigured gender and kinship relations in the borderlands. Chapter 3 addresses experiences of the Chinese diaspora in Burma and how transnational migration of Yunnanese capital and labor engendered new ideas, institutions, and identities that aimed at modernizing the “backward” borderlands and its people. Such institutions as schools, organizations, and journals in turn fostered a Pan-Chinese identity and progressive ideas of nationalism and revolution in border towns like Tengchong and Mandalay. Chapter 4 examines how the penetration of corporations, the state, and migration in Kham in the wake of late-Qing statebuilding ended up excluding the indigenous Khampa communities from access to land, resources, and economic opportunities.
Part 2 traces the rise and conquests of Yunnan's state-run corporations. Chapter 5 investigates the origin and evolution of mechanized mining from the 1870s to the 1910s, which gave rise to a dominant development discourse that naturalized the hierarchies of ethnic differences. New joint state-merchant corporations thus served as a means to expand state control and establish sovereignty over territories and resources. Chapter 6 explores Yunnan's industrialization in the 1920s and 1930s under the entrepreneurial technocrat Miao Yuntai (1894–1988), whose vision of profit-driven state corporations combined corporate governance with rationalization of state oversight. While Miao's approach valued managerial autonomy and performance of private corporations, it nonetheless stressed state control owing to his vision of Yunnan as a backward and ethnically diverse borderland. Chapter 7 covers the wartime and postwar eras from 1938 to 1949 and examines how the assemblage of state initiatives and institutions undermined the autonomy of private corporations and minority communities of Western Yunnan. As Giersch shows, the state-initiated developmental plans were part of the "civilizing project" that not only imposed state control over borderlands resources and peoples but also rationalized and institutionalized subordination of indigenous communities in the name of economic development. The epilogue layouts the state conquest of private corporations and their integration into the planned economy of the Communist regime in the 1950s.
There are a few minor quibbles. The book would certainly benefit from a glossary of terms and names in Chinese characters. An integrated map that marks the relative positions of key localities like Heshun and Xizhou would be helpful. The reference to historical figures by both surnames and first names can sometimes be confusing. However, none of this should detract from the book's important contributions. Challenging the prevalent stereotype of the borderlands as economic and cultural backwaters, Giersch's analysis of Yunnan's corporations brings a fresh, valuable perspective on the borderlands as a forefront of change where new ideas, institutions, and practices were formulated, experimented with, and then implemented in other regions. Giersch is at his best when he elucidates how borderland actors, both individual and corporate, helped transform the Southwest through the implementation of new practices and instruments. This book should be essential reading for scholars of the histories of borderlands, business, statebuilding, and ethnic politics of modern China. It should also appeal to general readers and students alike interested in colonialism, inequality, migration, and nationalism.
