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

In Nation, Governance, and Modernity in China: Canton, 1900-1927, Michael Tsin presents a detailed social history of the city of Canton from the late Qing to the mid-Republican period. Tsin's work joins profiles of other Chinese cities like Shanghai, Beijing, Chengdu, and Ji'nan that have been the focus of in-depth urban studies. Tsin's contribution is a worthy addition to this genre but his ambition is even greater, for at the very least he is attempting to write a social history of an early phase of the Chinese Revolution. Much like John Fitzgerald's Awakening China, Tsin's book revisits the troubled decade of the 1920s when Sun Yat-sen and his Guomindang (GMD), prodded by the Communist International, first allied with but then turned against the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) during the Nationalist Revolution.

Canton, Sun's most dependable urban base, is part of this revolutionary history. Like Fitzgerald, Tsin tries to escape the straitjacket of both GMD and CCP historiography and places familiar and yet still controversial events into broader economic, social, and cultural contexts. Tsin also situates his exploration of the 1920s in a narrative of transformation dating to the late Qing. Of particular interest to Tsin are the changing social structure, with an emphasis on merchants and workers, the expanding reach of urban government, and developments in the industrial sector as reflected in the latex and match-making industries. In his exploration of the first of these topics Tsin looks at the late-Qing Guangdong Merchant Self-government Association, a group whose advocacy of local self- government, constitutional reform, and cooperation with the imperial government allows Tsin to sketch an important voluntary association, founded in late 1907, and its contribution to reform rhetoric. Tsin's detailed research on this organization and its shop-assistant-turned-civic-leader Chen Huipu demonstrates clearly that these elite activists were not anti-Qing and sought to fit their activities into the broader reform currents of the day. This politicization of ordinary merchants, the nature of negotiation between government and nongovernment organizations, and the opening of a new political space are topics that Tsin returns to in later chapters.

Having sketched the society and economy of late-imperial Canton, Tsin then moves to the focus of his book, the 1920s. He describes the physical reorganization of space, the increasing complexity of social organization, the ambivalent role of Canton's merchant class in modernization, the political implications of a mobilized working class, and the demoralizing effect of GMD efforts to discipline the restive working class it had worked so hard to mobilize. Students of Canton's history will recognize events like the 1922 Hong Kong Seamen's Strike; the suppression of the Merchant Corps in 1924; labor unrest in 1925 fomented by rickshaw pullers, oil processors, and railroad workers; the great Canton-Hong Kong Strike of 1925-1926; and the failed Canton Commune of 1927. While readers familiar with C. Martin Wilbur's work, especially his The Nationalist Revolution in China, 1923-1928, will not find anything particularly new in Tsin's narratives of the more well known events, Tsin does an excellent job in connecting the political to the social. Instead of subordinating Canton to a national revolutionary narrative, Tsin explores how this narrative is reconfigured when viewed from the perspective of the local. For example, he shows how tensions caused by fiscal reforms attempted by Canton's GMD-led government in 1923-1924 alienated even further the city's merchant community. Their Merchant Corps challenged Sun Yat-sen's authority in the summer and fall of 1924, and a bloody and fiery denouement in October left much of Canton's commercial quarter destroyed and the merchants vanquished and bitter.

But this is more than local history, for Tsin's argument, as the title of this monograph suggests, is much more ambitious. The GMD...