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.Footnote ¹ In Yunnan, the Naxi studied by Mette Hansen did much better in schooling than the Tai.Footnote ² 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.Footnote ³ 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.

Some of the methodological difficulties specific to Giersh's inquiry will be discussed below, but for starters there is one big challenge that applies to everyone who wants to work on the Southwest. Archives in Yunnan have always been notoriously restrictive, and since 2018, Sichuan's previously fairly liberal provincial archive has closed access to all its Xikang material, as well as all post-1949 files. Giersch has used some material from the Yunnan Provincial Archives, as well as documents held in local libraries in western Yunnan, Taipei archives, and records from colonial Burma held in London. Overall, the result is an outstanding book that deserves a wide readership among anybody interested in business history or ethnicity.

Giersch shows that there was a major expansion of business activity in Yunnan from the mid-nineteenth century, involving significant innovation in business practice that included the use of new bookkeeping and new management techniques. This was not the result of British and French colonialism in neighboring regions of Southeast Asia, which only started after changes in Yunnanese business had begun. Instead, the new business practices were likely picked up from Shanxi banks and Shaanxi merchants, the latter having pioneered similar innovations in other parts of the empire in earlier times. Nonetheless, Yunnanese firms’ ties to colonial Burma in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were clearly important. These connections were not only significant for trade. In chapter three, Giersch profiles several figures who hailed from Yunnanese merchant families and who spent formative periods in Burma before becoming significant in Southwest China's business and politics in the Republican era.

All historians make tough choices about where to begin and end a project, and these choices have implications for interpretation. Chapter 5 notes that the Panthay Rebellion (1856–73) left “large parts of Yunnan Province … in ruins, its populations scattered or dead and its key trade towns decimated” (128). But this only takes a couple of paragraphs in the whole book. Carol Benedict's book on the bubonic plague that spread from Yunnan in the early nineteenth century is not cited.Footnote ⁴ “Sometime around 1800,” Benedict writes “the village of Yangtangli in Dengchuan department experienced an epidemic so devastating that it had not recovered fifty years later.”Footnote ⁵ How different would our view of the growth of business enterprise and trade in the second half of the nineteenth century be if the book had been grounded more firmly in the early-and mid-century catastrophes? Growth might then have to be seen more as a recovery from disaster, albeit one that embodied—as most recoveries do—new practices and innovation. Or perhaps the mid-century upheavals might be cast as the destructive force that cleared out an established order, enabling the development of the late nineteenth-century economic institutions? I mention this not to quibble with Giersch, but because I believe this would be a fine subject for further research (and I remain somewhat dissatisfied with the way I have treated this question in my own work).

Another of the standout features of the book is the subtle discussion of the business culture of Yunnanese firms in chapters one and two. Giersch shows that lineage connections were important in the Yunnan firms, as was the tradition of Confucian learning. But in this context lineages did not have a corporate identity, and the firms adopted modern management practices to supervise their agents. Contrary to stereotypes about Confucian Chinese business culture, they “did not rely on filial loyalty alone to incentivize hard, honest work” (45).

One of the book's central concerns is the emergence of ethnic economic inequality. There are many examples of government officials and the intellectuals who contributed to regional development-orientated journals writing prejudicial and dismissive things about non-Han people. The Tai hereditary elite were labelled “a national cancer” by one writer (187). There are also many cases in which non-Han people were the targets of provincial and national state violence, especially in Kham. Readers get an important reminder that one did not need to be Han or work exclusively in Han interests to participate in oppression in deed and word, as is shown by the example of Long Yun, the Yi chairman of the Yunnan Provincial Government from 1928, who promoted “elite Yi causes” (146). Lu Congren, another example of an Yi who worked for the Yunnan provincial government, developed plans for “civilizing” and “developing” the Tai lands in western Yunnan.

As for economic trends beyond discourse, the book serves more as a starting point for questions to which we do not yet have answers. It is a reasonable hypothesis that as Han private and state-backed enterprises grew, and provincial government became the domain of Chinese nationalists, one consequence was deepening inequality between Han and others connected with new enterprises and the state, on the one hand, and non-Han groups who were not, on the other hand. During the Second World War, for example, government loan and cooperative schemes were widespread throughout Yunnan, but border regions inhabited by non-Han people were “conspicuously absent” from the areas where these initiatives operated (173). However, it is very difficult to find data on how much difference this made. Giersch is careful to stick to what he can demonstrate with evidence, but there are significant questions for future scholars about when exactly the “tenacious patterns of ethnic economic inequality” mentioned in the blurb of the book emerged. The following discussion outlines the challenges involved with trying to demonstrate that the rise of Chinese nationalism and Han-centric state and private enterprises increased ethnic economic inequality in the Republican period. The point is not to poke holes in Giersch's work, which I believe is very good indeed, but to show the challenges of researching and establishing a thesis about when and why economic inequality became embedded in the upland Southwest.

Methodological problem number one is that, as the book shows, all other things were not equal. Han nationalism and enterprise was only one of a number of trends that affected livelihoods across the region. Any research on the causes of economic inequality needs a way of accounting for this. To take one example: the number of Khampa trading businesses (guozhuang, or achak khapa) in Darstedo declined in the Republican period. This might have been related to the growth of Han-centric state power in the town from the end of the nineteenth century. But as Giersch shows, it was also because Yunnanese tea began to replace Sichuanese tea in Tibet, and tea trade routes from Yunnan bypassed Darstedo (114).

Methodological problem number two is that, as the book also shows, Yunnanese trading firms and other social actors cannot always be unproblematically categorized in ethnic terms. One of the firms that might have displaced the Khampa guozhuang in Dartsedo was the Yongchangxiang, run by men resident in Xizhou who were identified as “Minjia.” Giersch's book is not intended as a historical ethnography—and such an enterprise might prove fruitless—but there is a real challenge in researching ethnic inequality in a context in which the identities of the ethnic groups in question are as indistinct as the Minjia are here. Present-day PRC historians categorize the Minjia founders of the Yongchangxiang as Bai, though, as Giersch points out, “the concept of Bai as a rigid ethnicity category (minzu) … did not become salient until after the Nationalities Classification Project of the 1950s” (35). In the epilogue, Giersch develops a summary hypothesis on the overall trends in ethnic economic inequality: “In the late Qing and Republican periods major changes in merchant organization allowed Han, Hui and Minjia firms to gain increasing power over local economies throughout the Southwest” (202–203). Chapters one and two locate the Yongchangxiang founders in Xizhou, without clarifying whether they shared much or identified with other people who might be identified as Minjia elsewhere. Thus, we have no answer to the question of whether the success of Yongchangxiang was one example of a more general pattern of Minjia privilege, or whether it was achieved despite Minjia suffering discrimination similar to other non-Han groups. Without finding out a lot more about the Minjia we may never know. And to be able to make general statements about the privileges or oppression of any group, we have to first know that it makes sense to talk about them as a group.

Problem number three is simply a question of data. In a lot of cases key details seem missing. Having written a book myself on the history of the Southwest in the same era, I am acutely aware of the beam in my own eye here. But to give one example: Giersch indicates that during the Second World War, the Yu Li Mining Company's labor force in its gold mines in Lijiang's Dagu region was mostly recruited from Sichuan (179). But this does not necessarily mean it was a Han labor force, since the neighboring areas of Sichuan were inhabited by non-Han people who had a history of moving across the provincial boundary. Also, during the War, the demand for manual labor in the Southwest was high, with important consequences for local economies. According to one survey, Han left some areas to take laboring jobs on main highways or in the regional cities, making the Han presence in some cosmopolitan borderlands smaller than it had been before the War.Footnote ⁶ Even if Yu Li's miners were Han from Sichuan, this was an era of significant labor mobility for Han and non-Han alike so it is difficult to treat their employment in Yunnan as clear evidence of rising ethnic inequality.

Giersch's impressive book will surely spark a lively and engaging debate on key questions about Yunnan's history. Were new enterprises and provincial state initiatives big enough for their ethnic biases to produce inequality in the wider economy even before Han-dominated institutions gained control over most economic activity thanks to the Communist take-over? Or is it more accurate to note only that a Han-centric mindset developed in business leaders and officials in the Republican period, and this mentality was adopted in much more powerful Communist-era institutions? Conclusions on these issues might be a while coming thanks to the increasing restrictions on historical research in China, but Giersch deserves much credit for starting the debate.