Nation, Governance, and Modernity in China: Canton, 1900-1927 (review)

Nation, Governance, and Modernity in China: Canton, 1900-1927. By Michael T. W. Tsin (Stanford, Stanford University Press, 2000) 276 pp. $45.00

In this elegantly written and meticulously researched study, Tsin uses a social history of early twentieth-century Canton to explore the meaning and mechanisms of the political culture of modernity. One of the book's greatest strengths is Tsin's success in bringing social-historical and theoretical analysis together, using one to illuminate the other. He defines the political culture of modernity in terms of the "transition in technologies of rule" that Foucault noted for eighteenth-century Europe, a transition in which "the people" went from representing the "power of the sovereign" to being "the end of government" (9), a constructed social body from which modern regimes derived their legitimacy.¹

Tsin investigates both the discursive premises of this political culture and the actual mechanisms through which modern governments operate. As he explains in his introduction, despite the "voluminous literature" on nationalism--the concrete manifestation of the political culture of modernity--we have little sense of how it operates in the realm of social practice. His objective is to use the case of Canton--the site of China's first modern government (9)--to examine how the elite political impulse to create a unified national/social body translated into concrete social policies, and how society responded to these initiatives. Through his probing analysis of the key events and diverse players in Canton's history, he demonstrates that "the social was an infinite and unpredictable play of differences rather than an easily manageable organic and finite whole" (86). He thus highlights the challenge faced by all modernist regimes, East and West: "how to mobilize the people to become participants in the political process while negotiating often conflicting social interests and containing the masses within a manageable rubric for governance" (177).

Tsin tells the story of Canton chronologically, beginning with the late Qing period (1890--1911) when the language of society gained intellectual currency and became discursively linked to the nation. Contributing concrete examples to what are now tired debates on the issue of civil society in China, he demonstrates how this new language was appropriated by heads of civic organizations intent on repositioning themselves vis-à-vis both the government and society but not concerned with challenging official power. After the 1911 revolution, the ruling elites represented in Canton by leaders of the Nationalist Party, or Guomindang (gmd), undertook a number of self-conscious measures to reconstruct society. Following their modernist forbearers in the West, they physically restructured urban space and conceptually mapped society using the discourse of class. This was also the period when political elites began to use anti-imperialism as a means of mobilizing society. Using the example of the Hong Kong Seamen's Strike of 1922, Tsin exposes the differences between the new political rhetoric and social reality on a number of levels. He demonstrates, for example, that the transport workers' motivations for striking were economic betterment rather than hostility toward the mostly foreign-owned shipping companies.

In the following years, anti-imperialism became, nonetheless, the central boundary marker as the gmd government began to work in tandem with the Soviets and the communists. The gmd accused big merchants who were opposed to the government's excessive taxation and disruptive urban reconstruction of being aligned with foreign imperialists, thus targeting them as the prime group on the wrong side of the boundary. This tension culminated in an armed battle in 1924 between the government and the local Merchant Corps. While the big merchants were vilified in official rhetoric, the workers were privileged, and the gmd approved of the organizational work carried out by Communist activists within this class. Through a close examination of three sectors of the laboring class, however, Tsin demonstrates that this work ultimately served to fragment, rather than unite, the workers.

Tsin further explores...