In this extraordinary book, Johanna S. Ransmeier gives us a picture of Chinese society in the late-Qing and Republican periods that has seldom been seen in such depth and detail. Human trafficking in North China was not just a heinous crime affecting a few impoverished victims, but extended to transactions in humans that were commonplace and involved all levels of society. She demonstrates that a “robust market in servants, wives, slaves, concubines, child brides, prostitutes, apprentices, and adopted children thrived in North China” (p. 2). Using the abundant materials from the Beijing Municipal Archive, the First Historical Archive, the Second Historical Archive, local archives, newspapers and social surveys, the author features a few cases that are amazingly complex, detailed and frank.

This research reveals that there was widespread acceptance of the idea that people could be bought and sold. Women in particular were marketable commodities whose value varied according to circumstance. In this view, marriages that involved the payment of bride-price, which was the norm for all but elite families, were the equivalent of purchases. Concubines, servants, nannies and others were more explicitly marketable. Wife-selling was illegal, but mitigating circumstances, such as hardship or infidelity, were taken into account by magistrates. In the first chapter, a young woman is bought and sold four different times in four different circumstances within two years. The sellers included her father, her husband, her father-in-law and a friend of her father's – i.e. family members and not professional traffickers. She was indeed “portable property,” as the chapter title states, serving as wife, daughter, concubine and mother.

The frequency and ordinariness of such transactions allows Ransmeier to argue that Chinese families were “transactional families,” in contrast to the Confucian ideal family. They included domestic servants of various types whose role in the families were quite mutable, especially in the case of tongyangxi, whose status was theoretically that of child “brides-in-waiting,” but who were often no better than exploited household servants. “Families” could include fictive families, such as acting troupes or beggar-gangs, or other groups defined by co-residency. Their boundaries were frequently crossed and changeable. As in Matthew Sommer's path-breaking Polyandry and Wife-Selling in Qing Dynasty China: Survival Strategies and Judicial Interventions (University of California Press, 2015), Ransmeier's rich and nuanced descriptions of different domestic situations taken from the historical record resemble ethnographies derived from field work.

In revising the traditional notions of “family” and “marriage,” Sold People goes beyond Polyandry and Wife-Selling to include a wider range of transactions than husband-buying and wife-selling, and to focus on the late-19th and early-20th centuries, a period when the usual economic hardship in North China was compounded by natural and political disasters. The sales of women and children were survival strategies caused by necessity, which is why they were not prosecuted by magistrates who understood that often the only alternative to a sale was death. Ransmeier deems such transactions a form of “community-level mutual aid” since they benefited both buyer and seller. Influenced by Western missionary opinion and newspaper publicity, however, some Qing officials and reformers took steps to ban trafficking. Although these laws were continued under the Republican government, they did little to diminish the trade, but instead had the effect of criminalizing it. Now, networks of professional traffickers, facilitated by railway transportation, developed within and between the large cities of Beijing, Tianjin, Shanghai and so forth. Their dramatic and detailed confessions are found in in the police records of the Beijing Municipal Archive and other archives.

From this research we can be in no doubt that women and children were commodities with economic value derived from their domestic, reproductive and sexual labours. Because there were many more men in China than women, due principally, it is assumed, to sex-selective infanticide, many men remained unmarried, increasing the demand for females. The shortage of female labour did not mean that women had more of a voice or exercised any agency since they did not own their own labour power. Yet from the late Qing onward, there were more employment opportunities for poor women due to geographic mobility and industrial opportunities. As in Zhao Ma's Runaway Wives, Urban Crimes, and Survival Tactics in Wartime Beijing, 1937–1949 (Harvard University Asia Center, 2015), some women in Sold People showed amazing resourcefulness and should not be regarded as passive victims of circumstances. The insights provided by Sold People in turn lead to more questions about these complex historical developments. That a high sex-ratio and human trafficking persist in China even today only highlights the paradox of human vulnerability amidst economic opportunity and growth.