In Corporate Conquests, C. Patterson Giersch seeks to forcefully insert two subfields of history into the center of our understanding of modern China. The first is business, specifically enterprise history, an often marginalized and unfashionable approach. He turns his attention to business enterprises—private, public, and hybrid—from the late Qing until contemporary times. The second is borderlands history, an area that has received far more attention as of late. Looking at southwest China—Yunnan and the Tibetan borderlands—Giersch recognizes that this is one of the poorer areas of China, and that within the area, minority populations such as the Tai have a lower standard of living than the Han. The inequality facing minorities is found throughout China. Projects such as collective farms and state-owned enterprises under Mao and private and collective businesses in the reform era virtually always privileged Han over minority populations. Even “ethnic tourism” in minority areas that exploits minority culture is usually controlled by and benefits the Han.
But Giersch argues that this pattern of economic development that promotes inequality should be traced back much earlier, to the late Qing era. While the area was and remained poorer than much of China, economic modernization tended to deprive the Tai and other minorities of control of development. Giersch first turns his attention to the growth of the commercial economy in the nineteenth century, when a significant number of Yunnan-based institutionalized trading firms appeared on the scene. A catalyst for this development was growing trade with Burma, especially as British control increased. Eventually, a community of Yunnan merchants established themselves in upper Burma, dispatched from China, where some would pass many years as agents for the home firm.
Although the family firm is often considered the norm for Chinese business, Giersch finds that partnerships were more common in the Yunnan-to-Burma trade. Lineage organizations had been much weaker in Yunnan than in eastern China, but Giersch argues that these became formalized among merchant families in an effort to maintain control when male members often sojourned for years at a time in foreign lands. Although they might already have established families in China, many set up secondary households in Burma as the years piled up. Giersch argues that the use advanced accounting practices allowed Yunnan firms to manage and evaluate partners in distant locations.
Giersch argues that the businessmen who led these firms traveled broadly and were sensitive to the reputation of their home province as a backward place. Many were eager to develop Yunnan and reduce the stigma. Merchants from small villages visited Rangon, Hong Kong, Shanghai, and beyond, where they were exposed to very different societies. They supported revolutionary changes in politics, the economy, and education, and many backed the 1911 Revolution. Although far from the base of the May Fourth Movement, they nonetheless sponsored publication of journals that called for the modernization of China. The merchant community even set up schools and promoted education for girls. Whatever its reputation, Yunnan was not a backwater, according to Giersch.
These developments did not benefit the minority populations, however. Indeed, the new elites often (but not always) viewed minorities as backward. And the new economy exacerbated economic inequality. In the Kham borderland region, for instance, the local people supplemented their meager farm income by collecting materials for Chinese medicine. But as Han-controlled trading networks penetrated the region, a colonial pattern of exploitation developed.
Giersch focuses extensively on Miao Yuntai, a former mining manager who headed the Yunnan Economic Commission. During the war against Japan, he organized development projects in tandem, and often in competition, with the national government, which had relocated to neighboring Sichuan Province. Although Yunnan had maintained an independent currency and banking system since 1915, in 1938, it became increasingly incorporated into Chongqing's fabi currency bloc and its banks. Miao used these connections to gain capital investment in the province, often with local control.
The sum of private companies and state-developed enterprises, such as modern mines, created wealth for the Han elites and left minorities increasingly impoverished. One great strength of this work is that Giersch discusses changes during the Mao period that deprived the Han businessmen of control, but he continues the discussion into the reform era, when the entrepreneurs often returned. Miao Yuntai, who had lived for many years in the United States, came back when Deng Xiaoping began the opening and reform policy. But one thing remained constant—whether state-run, private, or mixed—the enterprises enriched the Han and marginalized the Tai, Tibetans, and other minorities of Yunnan and the borderlands, Giersch maintains.
This study is deeply researched in archival and published sources and has a historical sweep from the Qing dynasty to the present. It shows that ignoring the history of business enterprises, whether privately or publicly owned, is a grave flaw in our understanding of the history of modern China. It is an important new look at the history of the southwestern borderlands.
