One Industry, Two Chinas: Silk Filatures and Peasant-Family Production in Wuxi County, 1865-1937 (review)

The debate on issues related to development in late imperial and modern China has been at the center of scholarship, both in and outside China, for at least two decades. In the 1970s, younger generations in the American scholarly community challenged the then authoritative approach to modern Chinese history that located the dynamics of China’s development in the modern era primarily in the impact of the West. This new breed of scholarship, however, was far from being unified. It was deeply divided on issues such as how to evaluate Chinese development (or underdevelopment), how to distinguish growth from development, whether imperialism hampered or stimulated the Chinese economy, and so on. Simultaneously, in China historians immersed themselves in a search for evidence of so-called sprouts of capitalism in pre-Opium War China. The products of such scholarly pursuits, prolific and solid as they were, provided a footnote to Mao’s assertion that had it not been for the Western intrusion “feudal” China would have gradually developed into a capitalist system.

Linda Bell’s book adds a fresh dimension to this decades-long debate on Chinese development. Taking the silk industry in Wuxi and its vicinity in the lower Yangzi delta as a case study, Bell argues that a developmental continuum exited between urban-based, machine-driven silk industry and rural household handicraft. Cocoon production, which involved mulberry cultivation and silkworm raising and was traditionally a rural calling, was an indispensable part of the urban-based modern silk industry. Along with the rise of silk filatures in Shanghai and Wuxi in the early twentieth century, the Wuxi countryside became the principle site of cocoon production in the Yangzi delta. Wuxi peasant households took up cocoon production to serve the modern filature industry in the city, as well as the world-market demand for machine-spun raw silk. Nearly every peasant household in Wuxi engaged in cocoon production for the urban-based silk filatures. Hence Bell argues that there were “two Chinas” which coexisted in the form of one industry. The two—rural and urban China—were not competitive but, rather, mutually dependent. Although peasant households seemed to be the exploited party in this relationship, the fragmentation of cocoon production among rural households and the segmentation of the market among many layers of merchants and small-scale producers required a progressive elaboration among all the parties involved.

Bell refers to the phenomenon of the fusion of peasant family production with early Chinese industry as “China’s new developmental continuum at the turn of the twentieth century” (pp.2–3). This continuum was the essential feature of the silk industry and it serves as the theme of Bell’s book. Students of modern Chinese history will naturally relate Wuxi’s silk industry continuum to the rural-urban continuum that G. William Skinner and his colleagues (especially Frederick Mote) so skillfully argued in their monumental work, The Chinese City in Late Imperial China (Stanford 1977). Although Bell apparently has no intention of elaborating her argument on the silk industry continuum by building upon Mote’s model of an rural-urban continuum in traditional China, the reader may get a deeper understanding of Bell’s book by reading the two “continuums” together. By the same token, if we move the cursor up to contemporary China, we find some interesting echoes of Bell’s silk industry continuum in early twentieth-century Wuxi. Known as village and township enterprises (xiangzhen qiye), small rural-based industries were one of the major forces behind China’s startling rate of industrialization in the last quarter of the twentieth century, in much the same way (and indeed in the same area) that Bell depicts in her book.

Bell’s work touches upon a number of topics in Chinese socioeconomic history, ranging from industrial investment, management style, merchant guilds, and international trade to women’s role in the work...