Philip Thai's book is a rich and insightful study of the complex and evolving relationship between state and smugglers in China since the nineteenth century. It focuses on how the Nationalist government (1927–49) combatted illicit trade, and situates key legal and administrative initiatives amid longer processes of foreign resistance, state building, and wars that spanned the last decades of the Qing dynasty and the early years of the Republic of China. Thai argues that, in a fitful yet progressive fashion, smuggling and official efforts to suppress it, contributed to the making of the modern Chinese state by expanding its infrastructural capacity and strengthening its legal authority, as well as making its presence felt by people who bought, sold, consumed, and traded contraband. He reveals a vast world of commodities that traversed China's littoral and inner borders—sugar, saccharine, salt, rice, matches, antibiotics, wristwatches, opium, popular medicine, cotton, gold, tungsten, weapons, and more—and traces the ways through which such movements became subject to official interdictions and outlines their lasting political and economic consequences.

One of the most powerful and original insights in China's War on Smuggling comes from its examination of the Chinese Maritime Customs Service, which sheds light on how exactly shifts in political regimes and exigencies of war influence state–smuggler interactions. Thai follows an important tradition of interdisciplinary scholarship on state formation and illicit economies to recognize how acts of transgression serve to affirm and give reality to the regulating authority as well as symbiotic ties that bind states to their illegal counterparts (Josiah Heyman and Alan Smart, “States and Illegal Practices: An Overview,” in States and Illegal Practices [Oxford: Berg, 1999], 1–31; Eric Tagliacozzo, Secret Trades, Porous Borders: Smuggling and States Along a Southeast Asian Frontier, 1865–1915 [New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2009]). What distinguishes his approach is a lucid demonstration of how such dynamics unfolded in practice and of their responsiveness to external developments. In this regard, Thai's analysis of the near century-long institutional evolution of the Maritime Customs Service, “the primary institution operating on the frontlines of the fight against smuggling” (31), is exemplary. Initially established in 1854 to assess duties on foreign trade limited to China's treaty ports, this agency assumed myriad roles under the Nationalists during the Nanjing decade for revenue policing, and controlling illicit trade along the Chinese seaboard more generally. It expanded into the interior to collect taxes, and enforcing non-tariff regulations and prohibitions during the Second Sino–Japanese War and after 1949, became part of the Communist government's General Customs Administration. Utilizing a diverse range of legal and diplomatic sources, including the Maritime Customs Service's records, Thai persuasively shows how the agency's changing mandates, geographical reach, policing powers, and institutional capacity affected the economy of smuggling, which in turn simultaneously threatened but also helped bolster the Chinese state's authority.

Thai's approach to situating smuggling in the broader context of China's late nineteenth and twentieth century political economy sheds welcome light on the variety of actors involved in economic activities subject to shifting labels of illegality and designations of criminality. For instance, by underscoring the prevalence of female smugglers, the book not only provides a fuller picture of who was smuggling and why, but also uses the lens of gender to complicate commonly held presumptions about power asymmetries between state and non-state actors. Women smugglers could, as Thai shows, “expertly leverage…prevailing social taboos and notions of feminine weakness to their advantage” (115) in ways that stoked both more anxiety on the part of officials (compared with their encounters with more familiar male smugglers). Yet such smugglers also prompted new methods of regulation and policing, such as the employment of women searchers at customs houses and abroad steamships (153–54), which contributed to the emboldened authority of the state. Similarly, Thai provides a nuanced and inclusive treatment of the role and biases surrounding the smuggling activities of ethnic minorities and Chinese from Southeast Asia who were repatriated overseas, as well as Korean, Korean-Chinese, and Japanese smugglers (Chapter 7). As the reader comes to appreciate the sheer diversity of actors that Thai presents, questions may arise regarding their motivations for smuggling. Thai tends to maintain that smugglers were heterogeneous, but guided by economic considerations, and highly responsive to opportunities to profit that emerged from tariffs, regulations, prohibitions, and other statist interventions that affected supply and demand for different commodities. Yet, it is likely that smuggling possessed distinctive political and moral valences that affected the choices of smugglers in diverse ways, and which were not necessarily determined by economic incentives. To be clear, this under-explored possibility is not a shortcoming of Thai's analysis but rather a reflection of the well-known paucity of records that directly convey the voices and perspectives of illegal actors and necessarily omit those who successfully evaded the state, the law, and their record-keeping reaches. There is much more to commend about the careful and creative ways that Thai indirectly accesses their decision-making processes and smuggling operations and connects their micro-level experiences to broader macro-structural dynamics of empire, war, and state building. In these regards, China's War on Smuggling is a brilliant and innovative book, which opens exciting avenues for future research in legal and economic history as well as political science, that addresses the “darker” side of modern states and their economies.