C. Patterson (Pat) Giersch is a historian of modern China and Inner Asia. He earned his Ph.D. at Yale University and is a professor at Wellesley College. In his early work, he sought to understand the early modern origins of China's ethnic diversity, a project culminating in a book on conquest, migration, and cultural encounters in China's Southwest. Over the years, Pat has continued to travel widely in frontier China while investigating the transnational caravan businesses that once plied routes across South China and Southeast Asia, from Lhasa to Rangoon. This research is revealed in his new book, Corporate Conquests (2020), which examines the intersection of private business, state-led development, and the production of economic inequality in China's diverse borderlands.
Tenacious patterns of ethnic economic inequality persist in the rural, largely minority regions of China's Northwest and Southwest. Such inequality is commonly attributed to geography, access to resources, and recent political developments. In Corporate Conquests, I provide a desperately-needed challenge to these conventional understandings by tracing the disempowerment of minority communities to the very beginnings of China's modern corporate and economic development. Focusing on the emergence of private and state corporations in Yunnan Province during the late 1800s and early 1900s, the book reveals how private entrepreneurs and provincial technocrats experimented with corporate governance and economic planning to undermine community control over local resources and decision-making. Thus, the new ideas and structures of power now central to the Community Party's repertoire of rule were forged, not along China's east coast, but along the nation's borderlands.
C. Patterson Giersch provides a groundbreaking challenge to the China-centered narrative of the Qing conquest through comparative frontier history and a pioneering use of indigenous sources. He focuses on the Tai domains of China’s Yunnan frontier, part of the politically fluid borderlands, where local, indigenous leaders were crucial actors in an arena of imperial rivalry.
Patterns of acculturation were multi-directional. Both Qing and Tai created a hybrid frontier government that was tested as Burma and Siam extended influence into the region. As Qing and Chinese migrants gained greater political and economic control in borderland communities, indigenes adopted select Chinese ways. Chinese language was useful for trade, and relations with imperial officials were eased by wearing the queue and donning imperial robes. But indigenous culture and livelihoods persisted, and Tai aristocrats adopted rituals and symbols of the Burmese and Siamese courts.
Qing conquest and Chinese migration did not lead to simple patterns of incorporation and assimilation. Chinese economic and cultural influences were profound, but did not entirely undermine indigenous practices. These legacies, which would shape and complicate twentieth-century Chinese state building, hold an important key to understanding modern China.
Tenacious patterns of ethnic and economic inequality persist in the rural, largely minority regions of China's West. Such inequality is commonly attributed to geography and recent political developments. Corporate Conquests challenges conventional understandings by tracing the production of inequality to the very beginnings of modern development. Focusing on private and state corporations in Yunnan Province, ca 1880-1956, the book reveals how village entrepreneurs built powerful companies that reached deep into diverse communities. It then traces how interwar technocrats, influenced by global ideas and local prejudices, created China’s most innovative state enterprises, but also managed development as a civilizing mission. Standing against these trends were local elites, who conceived an alternative future of inclusion and local empowerment—a future rejected when private and state corporations were merged into a powerful network of control over resources and people.
Tenacious patterns of ethnic and economic inequality persist in the rural, largely minority regions of China’s West. Such inequality is commonly attributed to geography and recent political developments. Corporate Conquests (Stanford University Press, 2020) challenges conventional understandings by tracing the production of inequality to the very beginnings of modern development. Focusing on private and state corporations in Yunnan Province, ca 1880-1956, the book reveals how village entrepreneurs built powerful companies that reached deep into diverse communities. It then traces how interwar technocrats, influenced by global ideas and local prejudices, created China’s most innovative state enterprises, but also managed development as a civilizing mission. Standing against these trends were local elites, who conceived an alternative future of inclusion and local empowerment—a future rejected when private and state corporations were merged into powerful networks of control over resources and people.
Ethnic inequality is an entrenched and baleful feature of contemporary China. It manifests in man... more Ethnic inequality is an entrenched and baleful feature of contemporary China. It manifests in many forms, from the mass internment of Uyghur in Xinjiang to everyday labor market discrimination there and in other provinces. Different minzu in China feel its effects in different ways. Even before the camps in Xinjiang, Tibetans and Uyghurs appeared to face significantly greater discrimination in the labor market than Mongols. In Yunnan, the Naxi studied by Mette Hansen did much better in schooling than the Tai. There have been excellent studies of the assimilationism and prejudice against non-Han groups in modern Han nationalism, but the complexities of ethnic inequality in history are difficult to research, especially as one moves away from elite discourse and into the realm of lived experience and economic inequality. Giersch’s excellent new book aims to say something about ideology in the Yunnan provincial state, and also about economic life beyond official planning and writing. So...
Cross-Currents: East Asian History and Culture Review
Author(s): Giersch, C. Patterson | Abstract: This special issue of Cross-Currents is dedicated to... more Author(s): Giersch, C. Patterson | Abstract: This special issue of Cross-Currents is dedicated to Kham, or Eastern Tibet, which, according to the European Research Council grant supporting these articles, can be called a “Sino-Tibetan Borderlands.” But why should East Asianists, including readers of this journal, care about Kham, and does it in any way help us to conceive of the region as a “borderlands”? The first question was on my mind in May 2015 as I participated in the first of two workshops devoted to Kham; the second was raised by rightfully skeptical participants—most of them experts on Kham—at the February 2016 conference in Paris that concluded this project. The two questions are related, I believe, and this afterword suggests that one possible answer to both lies in using local Kham history to push the boundaries of global borderlands studies. My goal is to argue for an approach that both frames the complexities of Kham for outsiders, including myself, and provides one (but certainly not the only) option for coordinating the diverse research agendas of Kham specialists...
For several decades, theorists have challenged notions of geographical space as fixed, instead ar... more For several decades, theorists have challenged notions of geographical space as fixed, instead arguing that spatial scales and regional configurations respond to transformations in politics and economies. This has raised questions about permanent regional studies configurations (such as Southeast Asia), sparking the proposal of ‘Zomia’, an alternative region focusing on Asia’s highland borderlands. Building on these developments, this article employs ‘process geography’ methodologies to reconstruct trading networks through the mountains and river valleys of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Inner Asia’s Kham, East Asia’s Sichuan and Yunnan Provinces, and Southeast Asia. In doing so, it reveals who traded commodities, on what scales they operated, and how their increasingly complex networks were imbricated with state and local power. These networks linked Zomian communities to Chinese and global transformations and influenced local cultural and political changes, suggesting tha...
Link: https://muse.jhu.edu/article/548086/summary Nineteenth-century southwesterners experienced ... more Link: https://muse.jhu.edu/article/548086/summary Nineteenth-century southwesterners experienced such rending changes that some Yunnanese developed new institutions to adapt. The cause of change was commercialization, which brought both opportunity and danger. To seize the opportunities, Yunnanese formed shareholding trading firms with "imported" Chinese management techniques. It became common in some towns to invest in or work for business firms, where acquaintances and kin were reconfigured as partners and employees. As certain towns enjoyed commercial prosperity, some believed that mobility and consumption were a threat, and it was at this time that Yunnanese merchants turned to the new discourses and institutions of filiality and lineage to cope with these crises of modernity.
Shi Shangxian was the youngest son of an impoverished Han (ethnic Chinese) family living in eight... more Shi Shangxian was the youngest son of an impoverished Han (ethnic Chinese) family living in eighteenth-century Yunnan Province. As a boy, he was sold to another Han family for the purpose of marrying one of the family's daughters. Although there is no record of his married life, it apparently was not a happy one. Shi left his wife in 1748, never to return, and drifted southwestward toward the Burmese frontier to engage in commerce between the booming Munai mining region and the Tai polity of Keng Tung (now part of Burma). Shi eventually remarried, this time to an indigenous woman who belonged to one of the local Tai or upland tribes. Thus far, Shi's story is unexceptional. By the mid-eighteenth century, as many as one hundred thousand Han lived in mining communities along the Yunnan frontier (ZPZZ, 1733–2, Zhang Yunsui QL 11/5/9). Han men often married indigenous women, to the consternation of Qing officials who feared the political ramifications of intermarriage (ZPZZ, 142–...
As our understanding of the Qing empire and its various borderlands has evolved, so too have we c... more As our understanding of the Qing empire and its various borderlands has evolved, so too have we come to appreciate China's early modern commercial sophistication. In recent North American studies of the Qing, the links between commerce and conquest have come under investigation, and we are increasingly urged to pay attention to merchants and merchant capital. But how should we understand the relationship between merchants and the Qing empire in the borderlands? This article surveys selected work on the borderlands and commerciali-zation, primarily in the Northwest and Southwest. The goal is to initiate a more comprehensive discussion of how to understand the intersection of commerce and empire while also making some suggestions for ways that borderlands history might shape future work on China.
Recent research demonstrates that, for over fifty years, the People’s Republic of China has tended to pursue development policies that disempower non-Han inhabitants of borderlands regions. Using Kham as a case study, this chapter demonstrates that the production of economic inequality, especially across ethnic lines, did not originate in the Communist period nor in actions of the state alone; instead, the sources of ethnic inequality were deeply entangled with trends in private corporate commercialization as well as with nascent statist approaches to modern economic and political development. To reevaluate the key elements of Chinese development, we must employ longer-range historical frameworks, and we must consider borderlands regions such as Kham, where diverse, and sometimes unexpected, actors have produced long-term impacts.
This special issue of Cross-Currents is dedicated to Kham, or Eastern Tibet, which, according to the European Research Council grant supporting these articles, can be called a “Sino-Tibetan Borderlands.” But why should East Asianists, including readers of this journal, care about Kham, and does it in any way help us to conceive of the region as a “borderlands”? The first question was on my mind in May 2015 as I participated in the first of two workshops devoted to Kham; the second was raised by rightfully skeptical participants—most of them experts on Kham—at the February 2016 conference in Paris that concluded this project. The two questions are related, I believe, and this afterword suggests that one possible answer to both lies in using local Kham history to push the boundaries of global borderlands studies. My goal is to argue for an approach that both frames the complexities of Kham for outsiders, including myself, and provides one (but certainly not the only) option for coordinating the diverse research agendas of Kham specialists.
Nineteenth-century southwesterners experienced such rending changes that some Yunnanese developed new institutions to adapt. The cause of change was commercialization, which brought both opportunity and danger. To seize the opportunities, Yunnanese formed shareholding trading firms with "imported" Chinese management techniques. It became common in some towns to invest in or work for business firms, where acquaintances and kin were reconfigured as partners and employees. As certain towns enjoyed commercial prosperity, some believed that mobility and consumption were a threat, and it was at this time that Yunnanese merchants turned to the new discourses and institutions of filiality and lineage to cope with these crises of modernity.
For several decades, theorists have challenged notions of geographical space as fixed, instead arguing that spatial scales and regional configurations respond to transformations in politics and economies. This has raised questions about permanent regional studies configurations (such as Southeast Asia), sparking the proposal of ‘Zomia’, an alternative region focusing on Asia’s highland borderlands. Building on these developments, this article employs ‘process geography’ methodologies to reconstruct trading networks through the mountains and river valleys of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Inner Asia’s Kham, East Asia’s Sichuan and Yunnan Provinces, and Southeast Asia. In doing so, it reveals who traded commodities, on what scales they operated, and how their increasingly complex networks were imbricated with state and local power. These networks linked Zomian communities to Chinese and global transformations and influenced local cultural and political changes, suggesting that studies of mobility can uncover hidden geographies of social, political, and cultural change.
This article explores late Qing (1877-1911) state-building in Inner Asia (Xinjiang, Mongolia, and Tibet) in three ways. It demonstrates how efforts to replace hybrid, imperial institutions with Chinese-style administration were contingent and unpredictable processes. It compares elite-state relations, in Inner Asia and China proper, to explore the diverse impacts on Mongol, Tibetan, and Han elites. Finally, it surveys reform-era (1898-1911) media to reveal how Han elites conceived of Inner Asian territories and peoples in new ways and with enduring consequences.
Cet article explore sous trois angles le processus de construction de l’État à la fin des Qing (1877-1911) en Asie intérieure (Xinjiang, Mongolie et Tibet). Il démontre que les efforts pour remplacer les institutions hybrides impériales par une administration de style chinois ont été des processus contingents et imprévisibles. Il compare les relations entre les élites et l’État, en Asie intérieure et en Chine, afin de déterminer les différents impacts sur les élites mongoles, tibétaines et han. Enfin, il étudie les médias de la période des réformes (1898-1911) pour révéler la nouvelle conception par les élites han des territoires d’Asie intérieure et de leurs peuples, ainsi que les conséquences durables de ces changements.
Tenacious patterns of ethnic economic inequality persist in the rural, largely minority regions of China's Northwest and Southwest. Such inequality is commonly attributed to geography, access to resources, and recent political developments. In Corporate Conquests, I provide a desperately-needed challenge to these conventional understandings by tracing the disempowerment of minority communities to the very beginnings of China's modern corporate and economic development. Focusing on the emergence of private and state corporations in Yunnan Province during the late 1800s and early 1900s, the book reveals how private entrepreneurs and provincial technocrats experimented with corporate governance and economic planning to undermine community control over local resources and decision-making. Thus, the new ideas and structures of power now central to the Community Party's repertoire of rule were forged, not along China's east coast, but along the nation's borderlands.
C. Patterson Giersch provides a groundbreaking challenge to the China-centered narrative of the Qing conquest through comparative frontier history and a pioneering use of indigenous sources. He focuses on the Tai domains of China’s Yunnan frontier, part of the politically fluid borderlands, where local, indigenous leaders were crucial actors in an arena of imperial rivalry.
Patterns of acculturation were multi-directional. Both Qing and Tai created a hybrid frontier government that was tested as Burma and Siam extended influence into the region. As Qing and Chinese migrants gained greater political and economic control in borderland communities, indigenes adopted select Chinese ways. Chinese language was useful for trade, and relations with imperial officials were eased by wearing the queue and donning imperial robes. But indigenous culture and livelihoods persisted, and Tai aristocrats adopted rituals and symbols of the Burmese and Siamese courts.
Qing conquest and Chinese migration did not lead to simple patterns of incorporation and assimilation. Chinese economic and cultural influences were profound, but did not entirely undermine indigenous practices. These legacies, which would shape and complicate twentieth-century Chinese state building, hold an important key to understanding modern China.
Tenacious patterns of ethnic and economic inequality persist in the rural, largely minority regions of China's West. Such inequality is commonly attributed to geography and recent political developments. Corporate Conquests challenges conventional understandings by tracing the production of inequality to the very beginnings of modern development. Focusing on private and state corporations in Yunnan Province, ca 1880-1956, the book reveals how village entrepreneurs built powerful companies that reached deep into diverse communities. It then traces how interwar technocrats, influenced by global ideas and local prejudices, created China’s most innovative state enterprises, but also managed development as a civilizing mission. Standing against these trends were local elites, who conceived an alternative future of inclusion and local empowerment—a future rejected when private and state corporations were merged into a powerful network of control over resources and people.
Tenacious patterns of ethnic and economic inequality persist in the rural, largely minority regions of China’s West. Such inequality is commonly attributed to geography and recent political developments. Corporate Conquests (Stanford University Press, 2020) challenges conventional understandings by tracing the production of inequality to the very beginnings of modern development. Focusing on private and state corporations in Yunnan Province, ca 1880-1956, the book reveals how village entrepreneurs built powerful companies that reached deep into diverse communities. It then traces how interwar technocrats, influenced by global ideas and local prejudices, created China’s most innovative state enterprises, but also managed development as a civilizing mission. Standing against these trends were local elites, who conceived an alternative future of inclusion and local empowerment—a future rejected when private and state corporations were merged into powerful networks of control over resources and people.
Ethnic inequality is an entrenched and baleful feature of contemporary China. It manifests in man... more Ethnic inequality is an entrenched and baleful feature of contemporary China. It manifests in many forms, from the mass internment of Uyghur in Xinjiang to everyday labor market discrimination there and in other provinces. Different minzu in China feel its effects in different ways. Even before the camps in Xinjiang, Tibetans and Uyghurs appeared to face significantly greater discrimination in the labor market than Mongols. In Yunnan, the Naxi studied by Mette Hansen did much better in schooling than the Tai. There have been excellent studies of the assimilationism and prejudice against non-Han groups in modern Han nationalism, but the complexities of ethnic inequality in history are difficult to research, especially as one moves away from elite discourse and into the realm of lived experience and economic inequality. Giersch’s excellent new book aims to say something about ideology in the Yunnan provincial state, and also about economic life beyond official planning and writing. So...
Cross-Currents: East Asian History and Culture Review
Author(s): Giersch, C. Patterson | Abstract: This special issue of Cross-Currents is dedicated to... more Author(s): Giersch, C. Patterson | Abstract: This special issue of Cross-Currents is dedicated to Kham, or Eastern Tibet, which, according to the European Research Council grant supporting these articles, can be called a “Sino-Tibetan Borderlands.” But why should East Asianists, including readers of this journal, care about Kham, and does it in any way help us to conceive of the region as a “borderlands”? The first question was on my mind in May 2015 as I participated in the first of two workshops devoted to Kham; the second was raised by rightfully skeptical participants—most of them experts on Kham—at the February 2016 conference in Paris that concluded this project. The two questions are related, I believe, and this afterword suggests that one possible answer to both lies in using local Kham history to push the boundaries of global borderlands studies. My goal is to argue for an approach that both frames the complexities of Kham for outsiders, including myself, and provides one (but certainly not the only) option for coordinating the diverse research agendas of Kham specialists...
For several decades, theorists have challenged notions of geographical space as fixed, instead ar... more For several decades, theorists have challenged notions of geographical space as fixed, instead arguing that spatial scales and regional configurations respond to transformations in politics and economies. This has raised questions about permanent regional studies configurations (such as Southeast Asia), sparking the proposal of ‘Zomia’, an alternative region focusing on Asia’s highland borderlands. Building on these developments, this article employs ‘process geography’ methodologies to reconstruct trading networks through the mountains and river valleys of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Inner Asia’s Kham, East Asia’s Sichuan and Yunnan Provinces, and Southeast Asia. In doing so, it reveals who traded commodities, on what scales they operated, and how their increasingly complex networks were imbricated with state and local power. These networks linked Zomian communities to Chinese and global transformations and influenced local cultural and political changes, suggesting tha...
Link: https://muse.jhu.edu/article/548086/summary Nineteenth-century southwesterners experienced ... more Link: https://muse.jhu.edu/article/548086/summary Nineteenth-century southwesterners experienced such rending changes that some Yunnanese developed new institutions to adapt. The cause of change was commercialization, which brought both opportunity and danger. To seize the opportunities, Yunnanese formed shareholding trading firms with "imported" Chinese management techniques. It became common in some towns to invest in or work for business firms, where acquaintances and kin were reconfigured as partners and employees. As certain towns enjoyed commercial prosperity, some believed that mobility and consumption were a threat, and it was at this time that Yunnanese merchants turned to the new discourses and institutions of filiality and lineage to cope with these crises of modernity.
Shi Shangxian was the youngest son of an impoverished Han (ethnic Chinese) family living in eight... more Shi Shangxian was the youngest son of an impoverished Han (ethnic Chinese) family living in eighteenth-century Yunnan Province. As a boy, he was sold to another Han family for the purpose of marrying one of the family's daughters. Although there is no record of his married life, it apparently was not a happy one. Shi left his wife in 1748, never to return, and drifted southwestward toward the Burmese frontier to engage in commerce between the booming Munai mining region and the Tai polity of Keng Tung (now part of Burma). Shi eventually remarried, this time to an indigenous woman who belonged to one of the local Tai or upland tribes. Thus far, Shi's story is unexceptional. By the mid-eighteenth century, as many as one hundred thousand Han lived in mining communities along the Yunnan frontier (ZPZZ, 1733–2, Zhang Yunsui QL 11/5/9). Han men often married indigenous women, to the consternation of Qing officials who feared the political ramifications of intermarriage (ZPZZ, 142–...
As our understanding of the Qing empire and its various borderlands has evolved, so too have we c... more As our understanding of the Qing empire and its various borderlands has evolved, so too have we come to appreciate China's early modern commercial sophistication. In recent North American studies of the Qing, the links between commerce and conquest have come under investigation, and we are increasingly urged to pay attention to merchants and merchant capital. But how should we understand the relationship between merchants and the Qing empire in the borderlands? This article surveys selected work on the borderlands and commerciali-zation, primarily in the Northwest and Southwest. The goal is to initiate a more comprehensive discussion of how to understand the intersection of commerce and empire while also making some suggestions for ways that borderlands history might shape future work on China.
Recent research demonstrates that, for over fifty years, the People’s Republic of China has tended to pursue development policies that disempower non-Han inhabitants of borderlands regions. Using Kham as a case study, this chapter demonstrates that the production of economic inequality, especially across ethnic lines, did not originate in the Communist period nor in actions of the state alone; instead, the sources of ethnic inequality were deeply entangled with trends in private corporate commercialization as well as with nascent statist approaches to modern economic and political development. To reevaluate the key elements of Chinese development, we must employ longer-range historical frameworks, and we must consider borderlands regions such as Kham, where diverse, and sometimes unexpected, actors have produced long-term impacts.
This special issue of Cross-Currents is dedicated to Kham, or Eastern Tibet, which, according to the European Research Council grant supporting these articles, can be called a “Sino-Tibetan Borderlands.” But why should East Asianists, including readers of this journal, care about Kham, and does it in any way help us to conceive of the region as a “borderlands”? The first question was on my mind in May 2015 as I participated in the first of two workshops devoted to Kham; the second was raised by rightfully skeptical participants—most of them experts on Kham—at the February 2016 conference in Paris that concluded this project. The two questions are related, I believe, and this afterword suggests that one possible answer to both lies in using local Kham history to push the boundaries of global borderlands studies. My goal is to argue for an approach that both frames the complexities of Kham for outsiders, including myself, and provides one (but certainly not the only) option for coordinating the diverse research agendas of Kham specialists.
Nineteenth-century southwesterners experienced such rending changes that some Yunnanese developed new institutions to adapt. The cause of change was commercialization, which brought both opportunity and danger. To seize the opportunities, Yunnanese formed shareholding trading firms with "imported" Chinese management techniques. It became common in some towns to invest in or work for business firms, where acquaintances and kin were reconfigured as partners and employees. As certain towns enjoyed commercial prosperity, some believed that mobility and consumption were a threat, and it was at this time that Yunnanese merchants turned to the new discourses and institutions of filiality and lineage to cope with these crises of modernity.
For several decades, theorists have challenged notions of geographical space as fixed, instead arguing that spatial scales and regional configurations respond to transformations in politics and economies. This has raised questions about permanent regional studies configurations (such as Southeast Asia), sparking the proposal of ‘Zomia’, an alternative region focusing on Asia’s highland borderlands. Building on these developments, this article employs ‘process geography’ methodologies to reconstruct trading networks through the mountains and river valleys of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Inner Asia’s Kham, East Asia’s Sichuan and Yunnan Provinces, and Southeast Asia. In doing so, it reveals who traded commodities, on what scales they operated, and how their increasingly complex networks were imbricated with state and local power. These networks linked Zomian communities to Chinese and global transformations and influenced local cultural and political changes, suggesting that studies of mobility can uncover hidden geographies of social, political, and cultural change.
This article explores late Qing (1877-1911) state-building in Inner Asia (Xinjiang, Mongolia, and Tibet) in three ways. It demonstrates how efforts to replace hybrid, imperial institutions with Chinese-style administration were contingent and unpredictable processes. It compares elite-state relations, in Inner Asia and China proper, to explore the diverse impacts on Mongol, Tibetan, and Han elites. Finally, it surveys reform-era (1898-1911) media to reveal how Han elites conceived of Inner Asian territories and peoples in new ways and with enduring consequences.
Cet article explore sous trois angles le processus de construction de l’État à la fin des Qing (1877-1911) en Asie intérieure (Xinjiang, Mongolie et Tibet). Il démontre que les efforts pour remplacer les institutions hybrides impériales par une administration de style chinois ont été des processus contingents et imprévisibles. Il compare les relations entre les élites et l’État, en Asie intérieure et en Chine, afin de déterminer les différents impacts sur les élites mongoles, tibétaines et han. Enfin, il étudie les médias de la période des réformes (1898-1911) pour révéler la nouvelle conception par les élites han des territoires d’Asie intérieure et de leurs peuples, ainsi que les conséquences durables de ces changements.
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Books by Pat Giersch
Tenacious patterns of ethnic economic inequality persist in the rural, largely minority regions of China's Northwest and Southwest. Such inequality is commonly attributed to geography, access to resources, and recent political developments. In Corporate Conquests, I provide a desperately-needed challenge to these conventional understandings by tracing the disempowerment of minority communities to the very beginnings of China's modern corporate and economic development. Focusing on the emergence of private and state corporations in Yunnan Province during the late 1800s and early 1900s, the book reveals how private entrepreneurs and provincial technocrats experimented with corporate governance and economic planning to undermine community control over local resources and decision-making. Thus, the new ideas and structures of power now central to the Community Party's repertoire of rule were forged, not along China's east coast, but along the nation's borderlands.
https://www.fulcrum.org/concern/monographs/3r074v42z?locale=en
C. Patterson Giersch provides a groundbreaking challenge to the China-centered narrative of the Qing conquest through comparative frontier history and a pioneering use of indigenous sources. He focuses on the Tai domains of China’s Yunnan frontier, part of the politically fluid borderlands, where local, indigenous leaders were crucial actors in an arena of imperial rivalry.
Patterns of acculturation were multi-directional. Both Qing and Tai created a hybrid frontier government that was tested as Burma and Siam extended influence into the region. As Qing and Chinese migrants gained greater political and economic control in borderland communities, indigenes adopted select Chinese ways. Chinese language was useful for trade, and relations with imperial officials were eased by wearing the queue and donning imperial robes. But indigenous culture and livelihoods persisted, and Tai aristocrats adopted rituals and symbols of the Burmese and Siamese courts.
Qing conquest and Chinese migration did not lead to simple patterns of incorporation and assimilation. Chinese economic and cultural influences were profound, but did not entirely undermine indigenous practices. These legacies, which would shape and complicate twentieth-century Chinese state building, hold an important key to understanding modern China.
Talks by Pat Giersch
Tenacious patterns of ethnic and economic inequality persist in the rural, largely minority regions of China's West. Such inequality is commonly attributed to geography and recent political developments. Corporate Conquests challenges conventional understandings by tracing the production of inequality to the very beginnings of modern development. Focusing on private and state corporations in Yunnan Province, ca 1880-1956, the book reveals how village entrepreneurs built powerful companies that reached deep into diverse communities. It then traces how interwar technocrats, influenced by global ideas and local prejudices, created China’s most innovative state enterprises, but also managed development as a civilizing mission. Standing against these trends were local elites, who conceived an alternative future of inclusion and local empowerment—a future rejected when private and state corporations were merged into a powerful network of control over resources and people.
Tenacious patterns of ethnic and economic inequality persist in the rural, largely minority regions of China’s West. Such inequality is commonly attributed to geography and recent political developments. Corporate Conquests (Stanford University Press, 2020) challenges conventional understandings by tracing the production of inequality to the very beginnings of modern development. Focusing on private and state corporations in Yunnan Province, ca 1880-1956, the book reveals how village entrepreneurs built powerful companies that reached deep into diverse communities. It then traces how interwar technocrats, influenced by global ideas and local prejudices, created China’s most innovative state enterprises, but also managed development as a civilizing mission. Standing against these trends were local elites, who conceived an alternative future of inclusion and local empowerment—a future rejected when private and state corporations were merged into powerful networks of control over resources and people.
Papers by Pat Giersch
Recent research demonstrates that, for over fifty years, the People’s Republic of China has tended to pursue development policies that disempower non-Han inhabitants of borderlands regions. Using Kham as a case study, this chapter demonstrates that the production of economic inequality, especially across ethnic lines, did not originate in the Communist period nor in actions of the state alone; instead, the sources of ethnic inequality were deeply entangled with trends in private corporate commercialization as well as with nascent statist approaches to modern economic and political development. To reevaluate the key elements of Chinese development, we must employ longer-range historical frameworks, and we must consider borderlands regions such as Kham, where diverse, and sometimes unexpected, actors have produced long-term impacts.
This special issue of Cross-Currents is dedicated to Kham, or Eastern Tibet, which, according to the European Research Council grant supporting these articles, can be called a “Sino-Tibetan Borderlands.” But why should East Asianists, including readers of this journal, care about Kham, and does it in any way help us to conceive of the region as a “borderlands”? The first question was on my mind in May 2015 as I participated in the first of two workshops devoted to Kham; the second was raised by rightfully skeptical participants—most of them experts on Kham—at the February 2016 conference in Paris that concluded this project. The two questions are related, I believe, and this afterword suggests that one possible answer to both lies in using local Kham history to push the boundaries of global borderlands studies. My goal is to argue for an approach that both frames the complexities of Kham for outsiders, including myself, and provides one (but certainly not the only) option for coordinating the diverse research agendas of Kham specialists.
Nineteenth-century southwesterners experienced such rending changes that some Yunnanese developed new institutions to adapt. The cause of change was commercialization, which brought both opportunity and danger. To seize the opportunities, Yunnanese formed shareholding trading firms with "imported" Chinese management techniques. It became common in some towns to invest in or work for business firms, where acquaintances and kin were reconfigured as partners and employees. As certain towns enjoyed commercial prosperity, some believed that mobility and consumption were a threat, and it was at this time that Yunnanese merchants turned to the new discourses and institutions of filiality and lineage to cope with these crises of modernity.
For several decades, theorists have challenged notions of geographical space as fixed, instead arguing that spatial scales and regional configurations respond to transformations in politics and economies. This has raised questions about permanent regional studies configurations (such as Southeast Asia), sparking the proposal of ‘Zomia’, an alternative region focusing on Asia’s highland borderlands. Building on these developments, this article employs ‘process geography’ methodologies to reconstruct trading networks through the mountains and river valleys of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Inner Asia’s Kham, East Asia’s Sichuan and Yunnan Provinces, and Southeast Asia. In doing so, it reveals who traded commodities, on what scales they operated, and how their increasingly complex networks were imbricated with state and local power. These networks linked Zomian communities to Chinese and global transformations and influenced local cultural and political changes, suggesting that studies of mobility can uncover hidden geographies of social, political, and cultural change.
This article explores late Qing (1877-1911) state-building in Inner Asia (Xinjiang, Mongolia, and Tibet) in three ways. It demonstrates how efforts to replace hybrid, imperial institutions with Chinese-style administration were contingent and unpredictable processes. It compares elite-state relations, in Inner Asia and China proper, to explore the diverse impacts on Mongol, Tibetan, and Han elites. Finally, it surveys reform-era (1898-1911) media to reveal how Han elites conceived of Inner Asian territories and peoples in new ways and with enduring consequences.
Cet article explore sous trois angles le processus de construction de l’État à la fin des Qing (1877-1911) en Asie intérieure (Xinjiang, Mongolie et Tibet). Il démontre que les efforts pour remplacer les institutions hybrides impériales par une administration de style chinois ont été des processus contingents et imprévisibles. Il compare les relations entre les élites et l’État, en Asie intérieure et en Chine, afin de déterminer les différents impacts sur les élites mongoles, tibétaines et han. Enfin, il étudie les médias de la période des réformes (1898-1911) pour révéler la nouvelle conception par les élites han des territoires d’Asie intérieure et de leurs peuples, ainsi que les conséquences durables de ces changements.
Tenacious patterns of ethnic economic inequality persist in the rural, largely minority regions of China's Northwest and Southwest. Such inequality is commonly attributed to geography, access to resources, and recent political developments. In Corporate Conquests, I provide a desperately-needed challenge to these conventional understandings by tracing the disempowerment of minority communities to the very beginnings of China's modern corporate and economic development. Focusing on the emergence of private and state corporations in Yunnan Province during the late 1800s and early 1900s, the book reveals how private entrepreneurs and provincial technocrats experimented with corporate governance and economic planning to undermine community control over local resources and decision-making. Thus, the new ideas and structures of power now central to the Community Party's repertoire of rule were forged, not along China's east coast, but along the nation's borderlands.
https://www.fulcrum.org/concern/monographs/3r074v42z?locale=en
C. Patterson Giersch provides a groundbreaking challenge to the China-centered narrative of the Qing conquest through comparative frontier history and a pioneering use of indigenous sources. He focuses on the Tai domains of China’s Yunnan frontier, part of the politically fluid borderlands, where local, indigenous leaders were crucial actors in an arena of imperial rivalry.
Patterns of acculturation were multi-directional. Both Qing and Tai created a hybrid frontier government that was tested as Burma and Siam extended influence into the region. As Qing and Chinese migrants gained greater political and economic control in borderland communities, indigenes adopted select Chinese ways. Chinese language was useful for trade, and relations with imperial officials were eased by wearing the queue and donning imperial robes. But indigenous culture and livelihoods persisted, and Tai aristocrats adopted rituals and symbols of the Burmese and Siamese courts.
Qing conquest and Chinese migration did not lead to simple patterns of incorporation and assimilation. Chinese economic and cultural influences were profound, but did not entirely undermine indigenous practices. These legacies, which would shape and complicate twentieth-century Chinese state building, hold an important key to understanding modern China.
Tenacious patterns of ethnic and economic inequality persist in the rural, largely minority regions of China's West. Such inequality is commonly attributed to geography and recent political developments. Corporate Conquests challenges conventional understandings by tracing the production of inequality to the very beginnings of modern development. Focusing on private and state corporations in Yunnan Province, ca 1880-1956, the book reveals how village entrepreneurs built powerful companies that reached deep into diverse communities. It then traces how interwar technocrats, influenced by global ideas and local prejudices, created China’s most innovative state enterprises, but also managed development as a civilizing mission. Standing against these trends were local elites, who conceived an alternative future of inclusion and local empowerment—a future rejected when private and state corporations were merged into a powerful network of control over resources and people.
Tenacious patterns of ethnic and economic inequality persist in the rural, largely minority regions of China’s West. Such inequality is commonly attributed to geography and recent political developments. Corporate Conquests (Stanford University Press, 2020) challenges conventional understandings by tracing the production of inequality to the very beginnings of modern development. Focusing on private and state corporations in Yunnan Province, ca 1880-1956, the book reveals how village entrepreneurs built powerful companies that reached deep into diverse communities. It then traces how interwar technocrats, influenced by global ideas and local prejudices, created China’s most innovative state enterprises, but also managed development as a civilizing mission. Standing against these trends were local elites, who conceived an alternative future of inclusion and local empowerment—a future rejected when private and state corporations were merged into powerful networks of control over resources and people.
Recent research demonstrates that, for over fifty years, the People’s Republic of China has tended to pursue development policies that disempower non-Han inhabitants of borderlands regions. Using Kham as a case study, this chapter demonstrates that the production of economic inequality, especially across ethnic lines, did not originate in the Communist period nor in actions of the state alone; instead, the sources of ethnic inequality were deeply entangled with trends in private corporate commercialization as well as with nascent statist approaches to modern economic and political development. To reevaluate the key elements of Chinese development, we must employ longer-range historical frameworks, and we must consider borderlands regions such as Kham, where diverse, and sometimes unexpected, actors have produced long-term impacts.
This special issue of Cross-Currents is dedicated to Kham, or Eastern Tibet, which, according to the European Research Council grant supporting these articles, can be called a “Sino-Tibetan Borderlands.” But why should East Asianists, including readers of this journal, care about Kham, and does it in any way help us to conceive of the region as a “borderlands”? The first question was on my mind in May 2015 as I participated in the first of two workshops devoted to Kham; the second was raised by rightfully skeptical participants—most of them experts on Kham—at the February 2016 conference in Paris that concluded this project. The two questions are related, I believe, and this afterword suggests that one possible answer to both lies in using local Kham history to push the boundaries of global borderlands studies. My goal is to argue for an approach that both frames the complexities of Kham for outsiders, including myself, and provides one (but certainly not the only) option for coordinating the diverse research agendas of Kham specialists.
Nineteenth-century southwesterners experienced such rending changes that some Yunnanese developed new institutions to adapt. The cause of change was commercialization, which brought both opportunity and danger. To seize the opportunities, Yunnanese formed shareholding trading firms with "imported" Chinese management techniques. It became common in some towns to invest in or work for business firms, where acquaintances and kin were reconfigured as partners and employees. As certain towns enjoyed commercial prosperity, some believed that mobility and consumption were a threat, and it was at this time that Yunnanese merchants turned to the new discourses and institutions of filiality and lineage to cope with these crises of modernity.
For several decades, theorists have challenged notions of geographical space as fixed, instead arguing that spatial scales and regional configurations respond to transformations in politics and economies. This has raised questions about permanent regional studies configurations (such as Southeast Asia), sparking the proposal of ‘Zomia’, an alternative region focusing on Asia’s highland borderlands. Building on these developments, this article employs ‘process geography’ methodologies to reconstruct trading networks through the mountains and river valleys of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Inner Asia’s Kham, East Asia’s Sichuan and Yunnan Provinces, and Southeast Asia. In doing so, it reveals who traded commodities, on what scales they operated, and how their increasingly complex networks were imbricated with state and local power. These networks linked Zomian communities to Chinese and global transformations and influenced local cultural and political changes, suggesting that studies of mobility can uncover hidden geographies of social, political, and cultural change.
This article explores late Qing (1877-1911) state-building in Inner Asia (Xinjiang, Mongolia, and Tibet) in three ways. It demonstrates how efforts to replace hybrid, imperial institutions with Chinese-style administration were contingent and unpredictable processes. It compares elite-state relations, in Inner Asia and China proper, to explore the diverse impacts on Mongol, Tibetan, and Han elites. Finally, it surveys reform-era (1898-1911) media to reveal how Han elites conceived of Inner Asian territories and peoples in new ways and with enduring consequences.
Cet article explore sous trois angles le processus de construction de l’État à la fin des Qing (1877-1911) en Asie intérieure (Xinjiang, Mongolie et Tibet). Il démontre que les efforts pour remplacer les institutions hybrides impériales par une administration de style chinois ont été des processus contingents et imprévisibles. Il compare les relations entre les élites et l’État, en Asie intérieure et en Chine, afin de déterminer les différents impacts sur les élites mongoles, tibétaines et han. Enfin, il étudie les médias de la période des réformes (1898-1911) pour révéler la nouvelle conception par les élites han des territoires d’Asie intérieure et de leurs peuples, ainsi que les conséquences durables de ces changements.