The Making of China’s Post Office: Sovereignty, Modernization and the Connection of a Nation by Weiping Tsai

Over four decades ago, in his Discovering History in China (1984), Paul Cohen succinctly surveyed the predominant postwar paradigms that had informed American scholarship on modern Chinese history—from “Western Impact, Chinese Response” to “Imperialism” to “Revolution.” The first of these rubrics included not only diplomatic and institutional histories but also discerning intellectual histories. The shift to “Imperialism” as a guiding theme in American studies of China’s history took up issues of political-economy. In many ways, an adjunct to the “Imperialism” framework was yet another master narrative of “Revolution,” of both bourgeois and socialist varieties. Cohen found all three schema wanting and called instead for more “China-centered” histories—meaning accounts of China’s past that paid closer attention to the internal and independent dynamics of China’s historical development.

This brief recitation of historiographic trends allows us to more clearly discern a revival of institutional history and a return to themes of imperialism over the past ten to fifteen years.¹ Weipin Tsai’s The Making of China’s Post Office is an intricately crafted and welcome addition to this scholarly current.

In terms of methodology, Tsai has made “a conscious effort to go beyond straightforward institutional history though [sic] engaging with the character and motivations of the people involved” (p. 3), first and foremost Robert Hart (1835–1911) and his (foreign and Chinese) colleagues in Beijing. Hart’s position as the first inspector-general (IG) of the Chinese (“Imperial”) Maritime Customs Service (CMCS) is already well-known. However, his personal vision and efforts were also the driving force behind the creation of “a state-run modern post office,” which, according to the author, “was a completely alien concept” in China (p. 21). As a counterweight to Eurocentric and top-down approaches, Tsai also foregrounds the agency of “both lower-ranked postal staff and everyday customers” (p. 4), local officials, and “individuals associated with private letter hongs” (p. 15), all of whom, in one way or another, figured in the creation of a national post office.

This multiplicity of perspectives reflects the array of primary sources that the author has meticulously collected over a decade of research in London, Belfast, Boston, Nanjing, Tianjin, and Taipei. Indeed, The Making of China’s Post Office rests upon an impressively broad base of evidence, including central government, municipal, and other institutional archives; personal papers (diaries, correspondence, etc.) of key individuals; newspapers, historical photographs, and maps; and philatelic materials (stamps, letter covers, postage chops, etc.) (pp. 14–16).

As a conscious strategy, Tsai eschews a thematic approach and instead proceeds chronologically, which allows her to present a fully historicized and humanized account that highlights “the impact of events, together with the relationships and indeed the rivalries of the key figures involved in the creation of the Post Office” (p. 374). In constructing her account, the author tends to show as much as to tell. For instance, she conveys the “ambivalent quality both in the mindset of Qing officials and their practical approaches toward ‘modernization’” (p. 3) by conjuring a tableau of Prince Gong having to unexpectedly sit for a photoshoot in 1860 upon the ratification of the (First) Convention of Beijing:

In order to take the required photographs, [the British-Italian photographer, Felice] Beato “brought forward his apparatus … and directed the large lens of the camera full against the breast of the unhappy Prince [Gong].” This was done without warning, and not having encountered any machine like this before, the prince was struck with horror; it “looked like a sort of mortar, ready to disgorge its terrible contents into his devoted body.” On hearing an explanation of the purpose of the equipment, the blood returned to Prince Gong’s face, and he allowed his portrait to be taken.

(p. 37)

The inclusion of mise en scènes such as this lies at the heart of the book’s effectiveness and appeal.

The main narrative begins with the ebb and flow of factional politics at the Qing court during the last years of the 1850s through the mid-1860s, as detailed in Chapters 1–2. Occupying center stage is the relationship between Prince Gong (Yixin), half-brother of the reigning Xianfeng Emperor, and the Empress Dowager Cixi, one of Xianfeng’s minor consorts and the biological mother of his only son, the future Tonzhi Emperor. As is already well-known, Yixin and Cixi formed a politically convenient alliance in 1861; however, by the mid-1860s they stood staunchly opposed to each other—with the Prince and his followers espousing more far-reaching policies of modernization, while the Dowager and her stalwarts assumed a revanchist position of “anti-Westernization.” Factionalism at the highest echelons of state, then, offers a partial explanation for the decades-long delay in the formal establishment of a state-run post office as envisioned by Hart and Thomas F. Wade, a leading British diplomat and one of Hart’s ostensible supporters.

The plot thickens in Chapter 3, when Tsai depicts Wade falling victim to his own fear and envy of Hart’s gaining “too much power and too much patronage” (p. 92). As a result, Wade furtively set about sabotaging Hart’s embryonic postal initiative, which he’d originally championed just a short time earlier. Wade’s personal and professional pettiness, along with Prince Gong’s impeachment, eventually compelled Hart, in his capacity as the CMCS’s IG, to muster whatever resources were available to him and to put them toward postal reforms in the decades prior to 1896. The patronage of the newly ascendant Li Hongzhang in the late 1870s enabled whatever headway Hart was able to make in building “an experimental overland postal service, among the northern treaty ports to start with, using the CMSC budget” (p. 95). Equally important were the shrewdness and skill of lower-ranking customs officials, especially when enlisting cooperation among proprietors of private letter hongs (minxinju) and local merchants, all of whom were absolutely crucial to the operationalization of the fledgling “Customs Postal Service” and its successor, the state-sponsored “Imperial Post Office” (IPO).

In Chapter 4 the author goes to great lengths to show that the evolution of Hart’s “Customs Postal Service” into a government-sanctioned “Imperial Post Office” was neither straightforward nor preordained. On the contrary, Hart’s attempts at postal reform remained subject to the vagaries of bureaucratic infighting and palace intrigue. To wit, in 1876, the year before he approved Hart’s CMCS-funded postal project, Li Hongzhang launched a separate postal experiment known as “the Wenbao Bureaux.” This “semiofficial mail service” was in direct competition with Hart’s Customs Postal Service and was ultimately borne of Li’s misgivings about granting Hart too much power and latitude (p. 137). Hart, then, was ensnared in Li’s efforts “to clip the wings of British influence, efforts that extended into the 1880s and became more apparent as time went on” (pp. 121–123). Hart’s erstwhile patron thus became a sort of nemesis, at least in regard to matters of postal reform. Then, in a final twist, the decline of Li Hongzhang’s standing in the aftermath of the First Sino-Japanese War—together with Zhang Zhidong’s rise and Prince Gong’s return to power—precipitated the formal founding of a centrally mandated and state-run “Imperial Post Office” in March 1896.

Having addressed the question of why it took so long for the IPO to be established, Tsai turns her attention to the nascent postal system’s territorial expansion and administrative coalescence. Such developments entailed postal officials’ deepening involvement in the politics of an ever-widening range of localities (Chapter 5, pp. 177–186). Postal officials needed to convince local officials and their constituent subjects that the IPO was, in fact, both a trustworthy and a Chinese institution, especially given the groundswell of anti-foreign sentiment in North China during and after the Boxer Uprising (Chapter 6, passim). At every juncture, the push toward indigenization required close “collaboration with local shops” and temples (pp. 170–171). In addition, the IPO actively recruited and trained Chinese staff members whose knowledge of local conditions and dialects underpinned their effectiveness as mediators between the central authorities and the postal system’s increasingly far-flung jurisdictions (pp. 199–201, 237–238). The formulation of long-term plans for the IPO’s eventual integration into a newly created Ministry of Posts and Communications during the New Policies period (Chapter 7) came to define “a golden period for the IPO,” during which “the service was extended to interior provincial counties and … as far as Outer Mongolia, Tibet, and Xinjiang” (p. 295). In the meantime, foreign postal services continued to operate in treaty ports and their immediate surroundings as well as in the empire’s more distant frontiers. And, as Tsai notes, China did not gain formal accession to the Universal Postal Union (UPU) until 1914 and was, therefore, not a full participant in the late-nineteenth century’s “administrative internationalism.” Nevertheless, these compromises to Chinese sovereignty were still somewhat mitigated by the IPO’s signing of a raft of bilateral postal agreements with the major foreign powers (pp. 160, 295).

The accelerated development of the IPO was part and parcel of a wholesale restructuring of the Qing state from 1906 onward. And this, according to Tsai, was a genuine watershed, for “until then there had been no unified approach” to “the management of transportation and communications infrastructure through unified control of railways, the telegraph, steamship services, and the post.” Why? Because “each of these had been managed as ‘foreign,’ rather than domestic, concerns.” In addition, the concept of a more comprehensive and centralized communications network also “incorporate[d] the needs of the general public for the first time in Chinese history” (p. 295). So, over “the ten years of growth and development after the Boxer Rebellion [sic],” the postal system became an institutional vehicle for the assertion of China’s national sovereignty, not only during the last decade of Qing rule, but also during the republican period, as illustrated in Chapters 8–9 (p. 301).

The straightforward and smooth nature of the summary above is belied by the author’s constant attention to the IPO’s failures and setbacks, especially those experienced by mid- and lower-ranking officials in their efforts to overcome a persistent wariness exhibited by the general populace. Throughout the book, the vested interests of private letter hongs, Qing magistrates, and local communities prove to be major sources of friction (pp. 16, 156–157, 178–179, 194). In their refusal to use the IPO’s postage stamps, ordinary commoners rejected the notion of pre-payment for postal services not yet successfully rendered (pp. 212–213). More obvious and vivid forms of resistance, usually attributed to “local malcontents,” included the smashing, burning, and vandalizing of postal boxes and signboards (pp. 187, 204). Tsai’s deft presentation of such particulars indicates that the insinuation of the IPO’s “operational procedures and mechanisms” (p. 13) within the nooks and crannies of Chinese life was synonymous with an inherently disruptive reconfiguration of social, political, and economic structures.

Weipin Tsai has brilliantly captured “the unsettling and dynamic nature of Chinese modernization and its accommodation of both local voices and foreign visions” (p. 3). In doing so, she reminds us that institution-building is, at bottom, a wholly human endeavor, characterized by a complex mix of motives held by many actors whose historical agency and lived experiences are shaped by the specific structures and shifting circumstances in which they operate. In its presentation of a multi-dimensional and fine-grained narrative, The Making of China’s Post Office is both an important contribution and a testament to the reinvigoration of Chinese institutional history. As such, it should be of great interest to those who study the historical processes of modern state formation and, more particularly, the emergence of the “developmental state” not only in China but globally as well.