“The Global in the Local: A Century of War, Commerce, and Technology in China” by Xin Zhang

Steamer on the Yangtze ca 1906-07 (via Historical Photographs of China)

There is a general consensus that in 1820, China had the world’s largest economy. By the end of the century, it was suffering from an existential crisis. Much ink, scholarly and otherwise, has been spilled as to what went “wrong” and why; somewhat less common are discussions as to how China came to terms with the new globalized reality and what it, and Chinese society, did to emerge from the other side.

In his new book, The Global in the Local: A Century of War, Commerce, and Technology in China, Xin Zhang poses the issue as

 

 … how to ascertain changes in China in the global context that produced the rise of modern imperialism, intensified economic integration, and the spread of mechanized technology from Europe and North America during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The difficulty in answering this question derives from the fact that some of the changes were entangled with the aspirations for global dominance of the industrialized countries in Europe, North America, and, later, Japan. Based on successful military campaigns against the Qing dynasty, these countries deeply penetrated Chinese society, subjugating most Chinese people to their economic interests and imperial ambitions. Still, during the same period, aided by mechanized technology, China embarked on a transformation that extended its economic linkages to the rest of the globe.

 

This is a broad question, far too broad for a single book, so Xin Zhang has narrowed the scope to the city of Zhenjiang, some 250km or so upstream from Shanghai, and how it coped with the impact of the wider world all of sudden knocking on its door (and in some cases, knocking it down), in three areas: war, commerce and technology. In doing so, he takes aim at some prevailing conventional wisdom.

 

The Global in the Local: A Century of War, Commerce, and Technology in China, Xin Zhang (Harvard University Press, April 2023)
The Global in the Local: A Century of War, Commerce, and Technology in China, Xin Zhang (Harvard University Press, April 2023)

He opens with the Opium War. The Battle of Zhenjiang in 1842 was particularly horrendous and bloody:

 

Once the fighting was over, the British noticed that bodies of women and children were strewn everywhere throughout the city. They soon realized that this was only the tip of a massive iceberg of suicides and mercy killings that had cost countless women and children their lives… The air was filled with the stench of decay and burning, and the sound of people wailing was heard all over the city. It seemed that the only creatures left alive in the streets were the starving stray dogs searching for food.

 

Xin Zhang makes the not very surprising conclusion that:

 

The war brought Chinese local society into “negotiation” with modern imperialism, making it an exclusively negative form of liaison that led to a tragic outcome for the Chinese people.

 

The next two sections show the people, primarily business people, of Zhenjiang adapted to the new reality of, first, new commercial networks and the rise of Shanghai and then, specifically, the use of steamships, one of the most important new technologies of the age. Xin Zhang makes the point—obvious really, but which can be obscured in Western-told narratives of the development of trade and commerce—that Chinese companies, business people, finance and trading networks were not just integral to the regional commercial success of the period, but also proved adaptable and nimble, rather more so that the governments of the time.

 

Setting aside Xin Zhang’s discussion of the historiography—something for specialists—his conclusions will probably not come as much of a surprise to anyone who has given the question much thought: war is dreadful and Chinese traders and businesspeople have been adaptable, pragmatic and opportunistic for centuries. Xin Zhang also provides—possibly not entirely necessary—historical introductions to each of the subjects which can approach the length of the discussion of the specific matter at hand.

The strength of the book, as it is so often, is in the details. He includes, for example, a description of the different “currencies” in circulation:

 

The scales used to weigh ingots during the minting process were made differently from place to place. Because of this, for instance, cities such as Nanjing and Yangzhou had ingots made at a slightly reduced weight compared to those minted in Zhenjiang. The silver ingot used in Wuhu had a higher level of purity: the fifty taels of silver ingot contained silver worth fifty-three taels of fine silver (wenyin 纹银), the Qing dynasty standard. In Anqing, two kinds of silver ingots were used, one with fifty-four taels, worth fifty taels of fine silver, and the other worth much less. Then, the conversion process had to account for the “value assessment in Hankou” (hangu 汉估), or the conversion rate there. It also needed to reflect the bank-to-bank exchange rate, or “inter-bank offered rate” (chexi 拆息).

 

The reference currency was the Spanish/Mexican dollar but because there weren’t enough of these in circulation,

 

their conversion was against the value of the Spanish silver dollar—called “virtual silver” (xuyin 虚银)—instead of the actual coin itself.

 

Another interesting discussion is how the commercial health of Zhenjiang—located “at the crossroads of the Yangtze River and the Grand Canal”—and individual industries depended on the river (the Yangtze would change course and silt-up), the introduction of the railway (which moved freight away from the river) and the development of the road system. After piling into Zhenjiang in the last few decades of the 19th-century, “every foreign company using river transportation closed its office in the city by 1908.”

By selecting a few case studies and highlighting individual actors, Xin Zhang provides a bottom-up view of China’s history. Despite the great transitions of the period, he concludes

 

the people of China survived these changes. By successfully navigating the challenges posed by and seizing the opportunities afforded by global changes, they effected local changes that helped place China on its own path to modernity.

Peter Gordon is editor of the Asian Review of Books.