Fishing Wars and Environmental Change in Late Imperial and Modern China by Micah S. Muscolino (review)

Micah S. Muscolino’s Fishing Wars vividly describes the reciprocal interactions between the sea and the people who make their livelihood from it, social arrangements and institutions, the ecological system and state power. Environmental history, the history of local communities, fishery development, and the transition from Late Imperial to Republican China are all clearly depicted in this book. Muscolino uses appealing stories to convey his in-depth observations and analysis of the conflicts between different fishing groups in the provinces of Zhejiang and Jiangsu, with a focus on the abundant natural resources in the waters around the Zhoushan Archipelago in southeastern China.

Environmental politics is always related to “argumentative struggles,” as Hajer (1995) puts it. The discourse of environment thus consists of various storylines. What attracts me in this book is Muscolino’s grip on the different storylines of how various people and institutions have interacted with the ocean and its fishery. Drawing on his historical training and using an anthropological approach, Muscolino unfolds the story by exploring the weather and oceanic conditions, demographic changes, sizes and types of fishing boats and fishing gear, fishing technologies, local identities and social organizations, local temples and collective observances, government regulations and the responses of local officials and elites, the lives of fishermen and their families, the involvement of a newly emerging state apparatus, and the introduction of a new knowledge, mentality, and rationality vis-à-vis the fishery. These details provide a clear context for his research and illuminate the storylines and discourse coalitions underlying the historical events he discusses.

Local temples, for instance, functioned not only as the religious centers of local people from the same native place but also as the organizations that facilitated official regulations and resolved disputes. In Muscolino’s words, local temples were “the apparatus of coordination and control necessary for the coordination of environmental resources” (45). Whereas fishermen went to local temples to pray for protection and security, local officials and literate elites emphasized the role of local temples as “a symbol of order and stability” (40). When these local temples worked with fishing lodges (which, like the temples, were made up of people from the same native place), fishery financing, fishing gear and stuff provision, marketing, and the allocation of access to fishing grounds usually operated spontaneously, if not smoothly. This strong influence of people and organizations from the same native place created a solid underlying identity for the fishery not only in the Zhoushan Archipelago but also in other areas, whenever access to environmental resources became controversial between different groups in premodern China. Long before post–Cold War turbulence brought challenges to international relations researchers, “governance without government” functioned well in Imperial China. Yet just as Imperial China was unable to escape the encroaching imperialism of Western nation-states, so this self-operated fishing network and society could not endure once the pressure of modernization and rationalization arrived in the wake of the collapse of the Qing dynasty and the establishment of Republican China.

This brings us to another contribution of Muscolino’s research—namely, that he fills in the gap between the end of Late Imperial China in 1911 and the beginning of the Communist period in 1949. This important time, known as the Republican period, marked the beginning of constant efforts by the government, intellectuals, patriots, and entrepreneurs to modernize China. The Nationalist government, led by the Kuomintang, was not able to extend this modernist project into every dimension of Chinese society, but the aspiration toward modernization was inherited by the Communist Party after 1949. Yet despite the fact that there had been various imaginations and expectations of nature and the environment in Imperial China over the preceding two millennia (Weller 2006), the physical and mental defeat of the late Qing dynasty at the hands of Western imperialists forced traditional Chinese schools of thought and ways of life to succumb to the dominant ideas that defined...