For Sun Yat-sen, there was no question that the development of a national rail network lay at the center of China's future rise. In his 1921 work, The International Development of China, the construction of a massive 100,000-mile network lies near the top of his expansive (and expensive) priority list, and the rail map that accompanies the book, dense as it is with red lines indicating proposed rails, exists as a model that the Chinese state continues to strive for to this day. The central role that the development of a national rail network has had on shaping modern China is the subject of Elisabeth Köll's recent book, Railroads and the Transformation of China. This work of institutional history, which fills a long-standing gap in the historiography, offers a powerful lens for understanding twentieth-century China.

At the center of this work is a larger argument about the compartmentalized, regional nature of China's rail network for much of the twentieth century. Focusing primarily on the Jin-Pu rail line, which connects the coastal town of Tianjin to Pukou, just north of the Yangtze River, Köll skillfully reveals the ongoing power of regional rail planners who, for much of the twentieth century, successfully resisted the efforts of the central government to create an integrated national network. Köll argues somewhat counterintuitively that the regional nature of China's rails helped the railroad “overcome state weaknesses” (p. 92). But the larger implications of this enduring decentralized, regional nature of China's rail network is perhaps more interesting, as her work helps lay bare the institutional and infrastructural bones that have helped shape larger patterns of economic inequality in China, separating the capital-rich coast from the poorer interior. These patterns, which continue to resonate in China today, were in large part shaped and reinforced by the imbalanced development of rail networks, Köll reveals.

Drawing on sources collected from a handful of municipal- and provincial-level archives in China; obscure collections in the United States, Great Britain, and Germany; and a vast assortment of oral interviews with former employees, Köll's book blows apart a series of enduring misconceptions related to the development of China's rail network. Perhaps the most pernicious is the notion that what handicapped the development of rails in the late Qing period was the mindset of China's backward masses who, held back by superstition and fear of the new, actively opposed the development of not only railroads but also telegraph networks and mines, among others. The problem, as Köll convincingly reveals, is that where railroads are concerned, this is simply not true. Drawing heavily on the underused collection of materials housed in the Harvard Business School's Baker Library, Köll shows that in fact rails did not always inspire fear among a cowering, superstitious populace. Rather, those local Chinese elites called upon to negotiate with the foreign powers building rail lines often classified lands along proposed rail lines as gravesites in order to drive up the cost of land. She argues they were “shrewd negotiators” (p. 21) rather than superstitious peasants. It does not take much to realize that perhaps rails are not unique, and that many of our conclusions about an innate Chinese resistance to modern technology is rooted in overly credulous Western observers.

Seeking to identify, as Köll explains at the outset, “historical continuities and disruptions” (p. 4) from the late nineteenth century into the 2000s, the work covers a substantial amount of ground. Chapters 1 and 2 focus heavily on the early development of rail lines in east China and the enduring role of foreigners in shaping these lines after the founding of the Chinese Republic in 1912. Chapter 3 offers an important perspective on the success of certain lines in transforming rural life alongside the internationalization of markets for China's rural products. Whereas chapter 3 focuses on freight, chapter 4 concentrates on the train passengers, noting the growing popularity of train travel and the resulting impact on Chinese society and culture. Chapter 5 focuses on the professionalization and indeed politicization of railroad workers, and argues convincingly that railroad workers had powerful connections to Chiang Kai-shek's Nationalist Party. Chapter 6 addresses the outbreak of the Sino-Japanese War, with a particular focus on “railroad zones” (p. 210), which operated as a permeable node of contact between Japanese-occupied territory and unoccupied Free China. Chapters 7 and 8 focus on the emergence of the Chinese Communist Party in the wake of the war, and the ongoing tug of war between those planners seeking to centralize and the countervailing Maoist forces of popular mobilization, as manifested through the decentralization and regionalization of the railroad. The book ends with the rise of the centralizing power of the Ministry of Rails and its ultimately disastrous efforts to aggressively expand China's high-speed rail network.

At its core, Köll's book is a powerful work of institutional history that shines new light on the development of the ultimate statist project—the railroad. But one surprising feature of the work is just how closely it tacks to Chinese state narratives. While institutional history as a genre is often able to get beyond state-centered historical orthodoxies by turning the focus away from state organs, Köll's work reasserts the centrality of important political watersheds and a larger periodization that clings to critical dates like the 1911 revolution, the centralization of Nationalist Party power in 1928, the outbreak of the Sino-Japanese War in 1937, the CCP victory in 1949 (though she does point to the permeability of this date), and the various political campaigns of the People's Republic. One reason for this may perhaps be that railroads are so closely bound to the state and are dependent on state capital, support, and expertise. Yet it is also worth considering how much this is a product of the case that lies at the heart of Köll's analysis. It is likely that were she to have expanded beyond the Jin-Pu line to analyze the successes and, more often than not, the failures of rail lines located beyond China's eastern and central core, one might come away with a narrative that does less to reinforce state-centric narratives.

In spite of this concern, Köll's work offers an important new perspective on the development of China's rail network. The conclusions that she draws from the case of the Jin-Pu line speak broadly to scholars interested in infrastructure, technology, economy, and the power of the modern state.