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  • Gourmets in the Land of Famine: The Culture and Politics of Rice in Modern Canton
  • Tae-Ho Kim (bio)
Gourmets in the Land of Famine: The Culture and Politics of Rice in Modern Canton. By Seung-Joon Lee. Palo Alto, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2011. Pp. xviii+300. $55.

Seung-Joon Lee’s book delves into the issue of taste and quality of food, with the case of Canton (now officially known as Guangzhou) in the early twentieth century. It shows how Canton, southern China’s biggest city, had developed a sophisticated system of rice trade that could provision its people, and how that system was interrupted and eventually broken by the new Republican (Guomindang) government. This new government was driven by a vision of reforming Chinese society through Western science and technology.

The Cantonese had developed a unique system of commercial agriculture, often described as “sericulture combined with pisciculture.” Although it increasingly reduced the area of cultivable lands, the Cantonese secured their rice supply from Southeast Asia in exchange for their commercial products. They preferred Southeast Asian rice because it was easier to access and, more important, tasted better than rice transported from other Chinese provinces. Guangdong’s geographical isolation and lack of effective interprovincial transportation made it difficult to maintain the quality of Chinese rice in the Cantonese market.

Massive importation of Southeast Asian rice continued until the late 1920s, because the Cantonese could rely on a wide maritime trade network, one stretching throughout Southeast Asia and dominated by overseas Chinese merchants. The commercial network of Chinese émigrés was so elaborate that Canton could provision its people through the Hong Kong rice market, even in the turbulent years from the late Qing to the early Republic.

However, political upheavals politicized the issue of provisioning. The Hong Kong–Canton tie was problematized with the rise of an anti-imperialist movement in China. Canton’s reliance on foreign rice was also perceived as a problem when Nationalists consolidated their hegemony in Guangdong. The Guomindang elites embraced science and technology—especially statistics—using them to define and diagnose problems in China. Determined to solve China’s chronic food problems, which had [End Page 225] given it the disgraceful nickname of the “land of famine,” government statisticians identified Canton as the biggest importer of foreign rice. They argued that it was, therefore, responsible for the “biggest ‘leak’ of national wealth” (p. 128) and for aggravating the economic distress of the agrarian provinces in the country.

To reduce the “leak” from Canton, and eventually to integrate Canton into the national economy, Guomindang technocrats launched ambitious programs to “reform” both the culture and geography of Canton. First, they launched a “national rice movement,” which encouraged the consumption of Chinese rice over foreign imports, while pursuing “‘scientific’ reform of daily eating habits” (p. 121) to reduce wasted food. These “northerners” saw the sophistication of Cantonese food culture as urban extravagance. In addition, they also built the magnificent Canton-Hankow Railroad, which connected Canton and the Pearl River Delta area to the northern province of Hunan, the rice bowl of China. Meanwhile, the network of Southeast Asian rice trade was disrupted by a new tax imposed by the Republican government.

Ironically, right after the completion of the railroad, Canton experienced an unprecedented shortage of rice in 1936–37. Mistrust between the central government and the local elites made the provincial government incapable of importing enough foreign rice. The chaos in the rice market could not be easily solved, because the Guomindang technocrats already had dismembered the provisioning network of Cantonese merchants. In the end, with the increasing military threat from Japan, the central government monopolized the foreign rice trade. The author concludes that the Guomindang elites’ grandiose planning failed not because of their incompetence, but because of “their progressive stance and their audacious embrace of Western science and technology” (p. 220).

Recently, one can notice an increasing amount of literature on food and nutrition from the perspective of the history of technology. Most studies are still done by Western scholars on “Western” foods. On the other hand, historical research on rice, the staple food of East and Southeast Asian people, has mainly relied...

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