Although China's economy sprawls across a vast landscape and displays wide variations in structure and productivity, limited scholarly attention to the spatial dimension of China's evolving socio-political system makes Elisabeth Köll's study of China's railway development a welcome addition to specialists’ bookshelves.
The author, who counts a Hapsburg-era engine driver among her ancestors, has ridden China's rails, ransacked published and archival materials in four languages, and interviewed current and retired railway officials and workers. These materials underpin an analysis of long-term developments associated with several rail lines, each of which began operations in China proper prior to Japan's 1937 invasion of China proper.
The author devotes particular attention to the Tianjin–Pukou line, which united German-influenced northern and British-supervised southern segments and its southward extension connecting Nanjing, which faces Pukou across the Yangzi, to Shanghai.
While Köll provides extensive information about revenues, traffic volumes and other details beloved of “the dismal scientists,” this is not her central objective. She aims for “a comprehensive analysis of railroad development in China” (p. 10), that sacrifices completeness (she omits the Japanese-led South Manchurian Railway) to explore the full range of institutional, organizational, administrative, educational, political, military, spatial, economic and sociocultural outcomes arising from the injection of this novel technology into the heart of major cities and across China's rural landscape.
The result is a sweeping account of the railways themselves as well as the impact of railway expansion on multiple dimensions of Chinese life. Railways provided substantial economic benefits, not least to the millions for whom travel was sufficiently urgent (or lucrative) to justify expending “one-third of the monthly cash income of an urban laborer” for a short one-way ride with passengers often “packed into open gondola cars … as if they were freight” (pp. 135, 136, 139). The social impact extended even to etiquette, as rail travel brought male and female strangers into unfamiliar proximity.
Of particular interest to this reviewer is extensive evidence of continuities across the 1949 political divide. Early railways involved Sino-foreign joint ventures, and incurred costs arising from efforts to absorb technologies and management systems from different countries – issues that confront today's automotive and nuclear power sectors. Prewar rail companies expanded beyond business operations to build “small societies” – anticipating the post-1949 danwei system within state enterprises. Railway work became a hereditary occupation, which bound railway men and their households into tightly knit communities that survived disruptions from Japanese occupation, the Great Leap and the Cultural Revolution. Regional railway divisions achieved considerable autonomy, a circumstance visible in today's electricity sector as well. Scarcity of cargo space encouraged the proliferation of side payments; both phenomena persist in the 21st century.
Among many other virtues, Köll's study of China's railway development demolishes R. H. Tawney's memorable but mistaken image of prewar China's emergent modern sector as a “fringe … stitched along the hem of an ancient garment” (Land and Labour in China, Harcourt, Brace and Co., 1932, p. 13). Köll shows how railways, with their timetables and iconic clock towers, introduced China to the notion of standard time. Shortly thereafter, Hu Shi's tale of Chabuduo xiansheng, whose anti-hero misses his train, lampooned the inability of unsophisticated Chinese to master clock time. Within a few decades, however, wristwatches, the epitome of time-driven modernism, had become coveted wedding gifts, completing a rapid migration from the fringe to the cultural core.
Along with myriad details surrounding the internal operation and external consequences of railway development, Elisabeth Köll's wide-ranging and insightful work illustrates the reality that Chinese culture, although replete with venerable legacies, is no “ancient garment,” but rather a kaleidoscopic amalgam that combines old and new elements not merely at the margins, but in its warp and weft as well.
