The Salt Merchants of Tianjin: State Making and Civil Society in Late Imperial China (review)

Kwan Man Bun's study of the Changlu salt merchants in Qing Tianjin is a fascinating and well-crafted work on the development of one of China's premier commercial centers in the Qing period (1644-1911). His purpose is to analyze the pivotal role of the Changlu salt merchants in this developmental process in order to determine how they built their economic and political power, shaped the economy and culture of Tianjin, and influenced the special character of state-societal relations in North China's foremost commercial metropolis.

Kwan's findings and interpretive insights are numerous and important. His principal argument is that Tianjin was a unique, one-of-a-kind city whose economy, culture, and patterns of governance were shaped by the special relationship between the Qing state and its salt-monopoly agents—the Changlu salt merchants—on whom it depended for revenue and salt marketing in the Changlu Salt Division. The author asserts that this special relationship enabled the salt merchants to build a power base and leadership position in Tianjin with complex overlapping strategies that combined household management, community leadership, and political networking in the local, provincial, and central government arenas.

Finally, Kwan argues that the state's relationship with the salt merchants was a symbiotic one characterized by cooperation, negotiation, and collaboration. Yet even though the salt merchants were able to create an increasingly important leadership role in Tianjin's economy, culture, and local governance, the author asserts that throughout the Qing period, state authority, its revenue needs, and strategic priorities, such as government grain transport on the Grand Canal, grain storage in the capital, and the operation of the Changlu Salt Division, dominated and shaped the state-societal relationship with Tianjin and ultimately destroyed it in the chaotic last decade before the collapse of the dynasty in 1911.

The history of Tianjin's development unfolds clearly and logically from the introductory interpretive essay to the analysis of the collapse of the dynasty and the ruin of the Tianjin salt merchants in 1911 at the end of the book. The narrative is beautifully crafted with an economy of statement, which enables the author to weave his interpretive insights successfully into a densely packed and complex treatment of the topic. The introduction lays out his interpretive approach and his assessment of the major interpretive theories that scholars currently use to define and explain the state-society relationship, from Weberian critiques to variations on Habermas' public-private-sphere scheme. It starts with a vivid account of the public demonstrations in Tianjin in June 1911 that protested the forced bankruptcy and imprisonment of Wang Xianbin (1856-1939). Wang was regarded at the time as "the single indispensable person" in Tianjin (p. 1). As the head merchant of the Changlu Salt Division, chairperson of the Tianjin Chamber of Commerce, community leader and public benefactor, and political, educational, and economic "modernizer," he had emerged in the late nineteenth century as a pivotal municipal leader and had literally saved the day during the monetary crises that had gripped Tianjin in the last decade of the dynasty. Wang is treated in this episode as a metaphor for the special state-societal relationship that had developed in Tianjin during the course of the Qing dynasty and for the fracturing of that relationship due to the contradictions implicit in late imperial reforms that centralized imperial governance while simultaneously creating citizen-based forums that dissented from the reforms.

The Tianjin demonstrations, therefore, stand for the city's unique historical experience, and symbolize the core of the author's interpretive approach, which is that there were multiple and diverse state-societal relationships and emerging modernities within China as a whole. In contrast, he argues, current interpretive theories that bear on state-societal relationships are either too general, too reductionist, or too Eurocentric to explain the dynamics and complexities...