Fujian: A Coastal Province in Transition and Transformation (review)

Fujian: A Coastal Province in Transition and Transformation, edited by two Hong Kong-based scholars, Y. M. Yeung and David K. Y. Chu, gives to both the scholarly community and interested laypersons a comprehensive, carefully textured, multidisciplinary introduction to this province with its many population groups, its rich past, and its uncertain but promising future. The publication of this collaborative volume comes at a timely moment in the evolution of Fujian—and of the scholarship on this province—as it reaches new heights of influence in a rapidly developing China.

The editors have organized this long, twenty-one-chapter volume into four parts. They set the scene with a clear and useful introductory first chapter, which provides the necessary background material and outlines the topical focus of each of the following chapters. This is a carefully written essay that conjures up visions of the famous places in the province and even the sounds and smells of urban and village environments—but never lapses into purple prose.

The style of this chapter sets the tone for the rest of the book: clear and straightforward, carefully crafted, almost utilitarian, with a focus on the topic and the supporting data. This no-nonsense approach is adhered to by each of the authors of the twenty substantive chapters that follow. The reader can see just what the book is about without being subjected to a dry-as-dust layout of each of the chapters. I like to compare this book with David Oren's magisterial account of the third Arab-Israeli war of June 1967, Six Days of War (London: Oxford University Press, 2002). In the hands of meticulous, well-organized, and determinedly objective scholars, the precise accounts of the participants in an event, presented in their own words, can speak for themselves. The theoretical and analytical modes here are important for the ways in which the material is presented, but, in my opinion, data should drive analysis—in Baconian fashion. Analysis and the creation or adoption of formal theory—in the Cartesian manner—should not be allowed to define, overwhelm, or obliterate data, the stuff or substance of reality. In this volume, as in the Oren book, there is plenty of opportunity for high-powered, overdone description, but the editors and authors have rejected that path. Rather, it is the skillful way in which the data is handled that comes first, and the reader benefits greatly from this approach.

Before discussing the contents in detail, it might be useful to point out certain general patterns of organization that one can discern throughout the volume. The editors have established a basic pattern that defines the structure of the otherwise varied chapters. Each chapter begins with a rather formal introduction that presents the basic design or theoretical framework to be employed by the author or authors. This is usually followed by one or two sections that cover the development over time of a given sphere of activity—whether it be agriculture, the economy, the political structure, the transportation network, or cross-Strait relations. The present status of that sphere of activity is then examined, and the chapter usually concludes with a discussion on future prospects and possible problems. There are variations to this pattern when a subject does not neatly fit into a disciplinary niche or is interdisciplinary in nature. One example is the essay on the evolution of "development corridors." Another is the one on the nature of the guanxi networks that bind the Huaqiao (Overseas Chinese) of Southeast Asia with their relatives in Fujian. A third is the chapter on the patterns of urban development in the province. This carefully defined structure has great value because it makes a big book with diverse content that much easier to read. We know just where the authors are going and we see the process of development of a sector or activity clearly delineated.

There...