Like Cattle and Horses: Nationalism and Labor in Shanghai, 1895-1927 (review)

With paradigms having shifted away from grand narratives toward approaches that are sensitive to time and space-specific contingencies and local variations, recent scholarship in the China field has yielded new insights into and fresh understandings of various aspects of modern Chinese history. S. A. Smith's Like Cattle and Horses represents one of the fine studies of late that open new lines of inquiry and invite rethinking of some seemingly "familiar" issues. Chinese nationalism and Chinese labor movement are certainly familiar subjects, yet they are far from being exhausted in terms of interpretation as well as empirical evidence. Smith masterfully integrates the two stories, the result being an informative, enlightening study. The central argument of the book is that Chinese labor movement during the period 1895-1927 was informed, inspired, and conditioned by Chinese nationalism, a nationalism that was inflected by a language of class. (By "labor movement" Smith means both the outbreak of labor unrest such as strikes and stoppage and the formation of labor organizations.) Smith builds his argument with theoretical sophistication and a solid empirical foundation.

Taking stock of theories on nationalism, Smith rejects some of them and accepts and modifies others. He notes, for example, that "Gellner's insistence on the correlation of nationalism with industrialism and mass education is only of limited relevance to China, since it was still overwhelmingly agrarian and illiterate when the CCP took power in 1949" (p. 2). He also argues that Benedict Anderson's emphasis on the significance of print capitalism in imagining the nation needs to be qualified at least when it comes to the case of China. On the other hand, Smith sees the relevance of Anthony Smith's view that national identity is constrained by its ethnic antecedents. On the notion of national identity, he appreciates the views of Prasenjit Duara and Katherine Verdery about multiple identities and the different imaginations of different social groups and argues that "in the republican period, class formed one fault line around which competing conceptions of the nation crystallized" (p. 7). He sets out "to explore how, and to what extent, workers identified with the new conceptions of nation and class" and "how these conceptions became meaningful for their understanding of who they were and of their place in the political and social order" (p. 8).

In examining how the identities of nation and class were disseminated among workers, Smith follows Michel Foucault "in conceiving discourse as a particular system of language," but "gives more emphasis to the role of human agency in creating, sustaining, and utilizing discourses for specific ends" (p. 9). Taking a cue from Michael Billig, who defines national identity as "forms of social life" and as "ways of talking about nationhood" (p. 8), he treats class and nation not only as "ideas and representations" but also as "fields of practice" encompassing "forms of organization, collective action, and sociability" (p. 9). Analyses of both constitute the main stories of the book.

In step with the more recent studies on Shanghai workers by Emily Honig, Elizabeth Perry, and Alain Roux, Smith pays a great deal of attention to the social networks and identities with which Shanghai workers were traditionally associated. He points out that the responses of workers to the politics of nation and class were shaped by their preexisting relationships and identities and their culture or subculture. As Smith describes them, the social networks and identities of workers were constructed around native-place ties, family/lineage relations, and trade or job-related favors and obligations, and took the forms of guilds, native- place associations/groupings (bang), sisterhoods/brotherhoods, and secret societies. A culture of personal obligations, reciprocity, and keeping face permeated these networks and identities, and clientelist relationships widely existed between workers on the one hand and foremen/women, labor contractors, and secret- society bosses...