Quest for Power: European Imperialism and the Making of Chinese Statecraft by Stephen R. Halsey (review)

The topic of state making has captured our attention for the past several decades. Under the influence of theoreticians like Charles Tilly, many historians in the field of China studies published exemplary research to address important issues related to the efforts of the Qing dynasty and the Republican states to strengthen their control over Chinese society. Despite their monumental achievements, however, most of these scholars have focused on the state’s endeavor to penetrate local society rather than efforts to transform the states themselves. The appearance of Stephen Halsey’s timely book has broadened that focus.

Halsey sets out to question a common assumption that late imperial China had already been in a steady decline before it encountered the modern imperialism of the Euro-American countries and, later, of Japan. As his research shows, the Qing dynasty made considerable endeavors in state making in regard to its military, fiscal policies, and bureaucracy between the second half of the nineteenth century and the end of the dynasty (in 1911), narrowing the gap with its powerful foreign adversaries. Through these undertakings, as Halsey argues, not only did the dynasty allow China to escape from the fate of colonization by those foreign countries but it also transformed itself into a military-fiscal state, with a palpable effect on the ensuing Republican and Communist states, all of which seemed to share a similar nature with their predecessor.

The book contains seven chapters, as well as an introduction and epilogue. Chapter one is designed to contextualize the research with a discussion of the global conditions within which Qing state making occurred. After discussing the success of European countries in colonizing India, Southwest Asia, and sub-Saharan Africa by the early 1900s, Halsey observes that China largely avoided the same fate in the later period. This observation sets in motion his search for the reason(s). In the following six chapters, the author carefully examines the Qing dynasty’s activities managing foreign trade, money, bureaucracy, guns, transportation, and communication. As he discovers, the dynasty took a series of significant measures in each of those areas, including setting up the Imperial Maritime Customs Service while imposing a commercial tax (釐金 lijin); shifting the dynasty’s resource distribution from the western frontiers to the coastal region; creating new fiscal bureaucracy at the local level; installing a modern police force; adopting Western technology for the military industry to equip its army; and transforming transportation and communication through steamship and telegraph. Largely due to those measures, the dynasty expanded its revenue, modernized the country, and thus deterred the encroachment of foreign countries.

One of the many strengths of this book can be found in its wide-ranging coverage of diverse aspects of Chinese society. For example, in order to demonstrate how the Qing state dealt with foreign trade, Halsey touches on the reluctance of Chinese consumers to purchase foreign goods, the side effects of foreign corporations using Chinese intermediaries, and the practice of local Qing officials imposing various fees on foreign business. Halsey’s purpose is to show how all these seemingly unrelated occurrences, as well as social conditions, inadvertently contributed to warding off the expansion of foreign economic interests in China and gave Qing policies an opportunity to succeed. In discussing the Qing dynasty’s effort to modernize its transportation, the author describes in detail [End Page E-4] not only the debate among Qing officials concerning Chinese sovereignty but also the management methods of the state-sponsored steamship company. This broad coverage helps create a holistic view of Qing state-making efforts and thus allows the reader to comprehend the significance of them.

Of course, by doing so, the researcher has brought on himself a real challenge that demands a wealth of data. In many ways, Halsey has met that challenge. The materials he used for the book include a plethora of rare documents, some of which were obtained in the document room...