Corporate Conquests: Business, the State, and the Origins of Ethnic Inequality in Southwest China by C. Patterson Giersch (review)

Corporate Conquests unsettles Han-centric portrayals of Yunnan as a cultural and economic backwater of so-called China proper. Giersch invites us to think alongside visionaries in the Sino-Burmese borderlands—merchants, entrepreneurs, technocrats, and political elites who sought to capitalize indigenous resources and transborder trade networks to generate wealth and empower their Yunnanese hometowns in the nationalizing and globalizing economy. Taking a borderlands perspective, Corporate Conquests foregrounds the prominent role that Yunnanese firms and entrepreneurs played in China's state-building projects in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

In Giersch's account, private and state corporations pioneered bold, innovative models of business practices, mechanization, and state-led development, which had long-lasting impact on China's ethnic and economic landscape. They built prosperous trade towns that were not only economically vibrant but also, in writer Lao She's 老舍 (1899-1966) words, "respectable," "orderly," and on a par with "England's Cambridge" (p. 93). These achievements dwindled, however, as state discomfort with ethnic diversity motivated continual attempts to delegitimize non-Han leadership and eventually corporate autonomy in the borderlands. Giersch traces how private and state corporations contributed to the "assemblages" (p. 10) of historical actions that ultimately eroded indigenous control over resources and economic opportunities. The seeds of persistent ethnic inequality and "disempowered development" (p. 97) in Southwest China, Giersch argues, were already planted decades before the communist takeover.

Part 1 of the book (chapters 1-4) examines the impact of corporate practices and Sino-Burmese trading networks on reshaping traditions, behaviors, and relationships, illustrating why Confucian values, nationalist ideas, and desires for progressive change grew in popularity before and after the Qing dynasty collapsed. Chapters 1 and 2 focus on family and lineage. Analyzing a wide array of materials, including business ledgers, ballads, and architecture, Giersch writes against ahistorical assumptions that the "multigenerational, hierarchical, and patriarchal Chinese lineage" (p. 34) figured prominently in the early development of any Chinese business. He uses Yongchangxiang 永昌祥 (est. 1903) in 喜洲 as an example to show that combined expertise, market knowledge, and bookkeeping technologies—not familial connections nor preferential state support—were at the foundation of the shareholding trading firm that would come to control "an estimated 110 billion renminbi in fixed and liquid assets" by the early 1950s (p. 27). Giersch argues that Yongchangxiang's corporate conquests, reaching Mandalay, Rangoon, Lhasa, Chongqing, Shanghai, and Hong Kong, were an outcome of the firm's emphasis on "performance over kinship" (p. 40). Informed by both his knowledge about non-Han family cultures and keen observation of villas and lineage halls, Giersch makes a convincing analysis that the sons of Yan Zizhen 嚴子珍 (1870-1941), Minjia (Bai) entrepreneur who cofounded Yongchangxiang, joined the company as independent shareholders rather than heirs apparent from the same patrilineal household (p. 37). Kinspeople and friends of shareholders were all subject to performance evaluations.

Particularly insightful in these two chapters is Giersch's attention to historical sequence, which allows him to establish plausible causal relationships that position his protagonists as agentive actors rather than victims of circumstance. For example, Giersch takes pains to date the anguish ballad "Precepts for Yangwendun 陽溫墩" (ca. 1870s or 1880s, according to Giersch) in order to prove that renewed concerns about familial morality was "an act of creation, not of continuity" (p. 63): Yunnanese businessmen turned to lineage institutions and Confucian ethics in "search for legitimacy and stability" (p. 56) after corporate trading activities and transborder migration to Burma had become normalized. They "used their profits to create the lineage," not the other way around (p. 63). Here, Giersch begins to establish his argument that borderlands actors, in their attempt to develop their businesses and communities, "sought to be Confucian merchants" (p. 64) and therefore...