Johanna Ransmeier's book is a fascinating work that not only provides a vivid picture of social life in Northern China during the late Qing and Republican periods, but also offers an insightful study of a social phenomenon that has long been neglected. Her cutting-edge research is based on a broad use of multiple sources, including local gazetteers, newspapers, personal diaries, court documents, police records, and local magistrates’ notes. The book presents many colorful stories about how transactions in people happened and who operated them. It shows how traffickers preyed on their victims; how women, both victims and predators, were sold and sold others; how parents sold their children for profit and survival; and how other social forces and individuals, such as military men, neighbors, relatives, and gangsters, were also involved in trafficking. Meanwhile, ministers, county magistrates, policemen, and social researchers offered their views on these transactions, outlawed them, or treated them as a social subject.

The core significance of Ransmeier's work lies in her inquiry into how these transactions in the early twentieth century differed from the slave trade in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in the West, and how Western abolitionism impacted Chinese officials’ attitude toward human trafficking in China's social and legal transformation. According to Ransmeier, most Western scholarship approaches the history of slavery from the views of either property relations or power relations. However, she determines that either approach can only partially explain Chinese cases, as China's human trafficking had much more complicated facets and layers. Unlike the slave trade in Euro-American history, in China, especially prior to the mid-twentieth century, transactions in people largely operated through family networks, and was conducted by family members, neighbors, and acquaintances. The purpose of buying and selling people was not to enhance productivity; rather, it was for family adoption, domestic labor, family procreation, or sometimes survival. Thus, this buying and selling occurred widely in society, especially during times of natural and human disasters, and the process involved a range of social groups. To a certain extent, especially among the people in lower social strata, anyone could be a potential buyer or purchased victim (as discussed in Chapters 1 and 2).

Ransmeier also adds another dimension to the issue by pointing out that Qing officials repeatedly vacillated on this issue. They knew that human trafficking could create serious social, legal, and administrative problems, but they were also aware of the fact that transactions in people satisfied the demand for domestic labor. And some of these transactions served the purposes of family procreation and adoption, which had a strong ideological ground in Confucian family ethics. Although this created certain dilemmas, the official ban on human trafficking emerged in official Chinese reform agendas well before the introduction of Western legal concepts and judicial influence. Installation of Western-styled legal and police systems assisted the reinforcement of the ban, but also encouraged “an expansion of trafficking practices” (312). Chapter 3 offers a view on the legal reform of the late Qing regarding human trafficking. Under the impact of Western law, ideology, and international discussion on abolishing slavery (although the author believes that the reason for the Chinese ban on human trafficking was fundamentally distinct from abolitionism in the West), the Qing issued a series of new laws to outlaw human transactions. However, this reform clashed with the social demand for domestic labor and family procreation. As a result, the new Qing law issued in 1910 largely stayed on paper.

In Chapter 4, the author shows that under the new law, such as in the case of children sold by their families, buyers often falsified the transaction as adoption, which made it difficult for the police to detect these cases and prove otherwise. Moreover, this type of crime frequently fell through legal cracks amid the widespread population migrations facilitated by trafficking. In Chapter 5, the author then turns to the spatial extension of trafficking centered in special spaces called “thrice-neglected places” (san bu guan). These places, which existed in many cities, were a small niche separated from social relations, administration, and the reach of the law. The author also shrewdly observes that along with the new legal system, the introduction of modern technology, such as the railway system, also offered traffickers a more convenient means of transporting sold individuals, and further complicated police tracing of trafficking.

All these issues are well narrated throughout the book. Only Chapter 3 stands out as quite discursive, as the author tries to synthesize too many issues at once. It is a good choice to use the case of Zhou Fu, a local official, and his thoughts as an example of the complications of human trade, but Ransmeier presents a discussion of considerable length on Zhou's personal life that moves the chapter's focus off track. By contrast, in the last chapter Ransmeier presents Zhou Shuzhao's study on human trafficking in the Republican time, and this is the most touching part of the book. Zhou Shuzhao was the great-granddaughter of Zhou Fu. In the 1930s, she was a college student majoring in sociology at Yanjing University. She continued her great-grandfather's research, studying human trafficking and treating it as a modern sociological subject. She visited Beijing prisons and interviewed men and women convicted of human trafficking, and analyzed the social context and causes of this crime. Here I see the author connecting Zhou Fu's and his great-granddaughter's work on the same social problem, and in doing so reveals in which way China's past is linked to the present in dealing with this old and new problem in a rapidly changing world. In this and its other revelations, Ransmeier's book has made a great contribution to the field.