In 2010, the city of Wuxi, about 120 miles west of Shanghai, was home to more than six million people. At the beginning of the twentieth century, however, the walled town that served as the seat of government for Wuxi county – one of some 1,500 such units in Qing China – had a population of only about 100,000. The population of the county as a whole may have been seven or eight times larger. This book analyses the transformation of Wuxi county in the first half of the twentieth century, as the county seat grew into ‘the largest commercial and industrial city outside the treaty ports’ (p. 183). In addition to offering a lively portrait of a city, it argues that industrialization, warfare and political change contributed to a process of urbanization that affected all parts of the county, not just its densest settlement. The focus is primarily on physical changes, such as the proliferation of factories and transportation infrastructure and the development of urban administrative structures. A thorough use of archives, newspapers, travel accounts and other types of historical sources, as well as relevant recent scholarship in Chinese and other languages, allows Lincoln to make a convincing case that Wuxi's early twentieth-century urbanization proceeded continuously, despite war and regime changes, and that its reach extended across the county.

Lincoln, a historian and affiliate of the Centre for Urban History at the University of Leicester, divides the discussion into nine chronological and thematic chapters, moving back and forth from Wuxi city to its hinterland. He begins in the years immediately following the 1911 Revolution, a rather surprising choice given the significance that other scholars of Chinese urban history have seen in earlier developments, including the self-strengthening movement of the late nineteenth century and the Qing New Policies reforms of the first decade of the twentieth. Wuxi's industry, as Lincoln notes, took off after the Republic of China was established in 1912, but it was already substantially more developed than most Chinese cities in the years before the fall of the Qing. I shall return to the question of periodization below, after a summary of the chapters.

The first chapter analyses the expansion of mechanized industry in Wuxi, spearheaded by Wuxi natives such as the Rong family, whose flour and textile mills have attracted the attention of many business historians. These entrepreneurs shaped the city to fit their transport needs, building roads to the railroad station that connected the town to Shanghai and dredging the rivers that also were essential to commerce and industry. Global demand during World War I gave a boost to Wuxi's fledgling industry, Lincoln shows. Chapter 2 examines the surrounding countryside, arguing that towns and villages felt the effects of urbanization via access to new technologies such as flashlights, improved transportation and scientific advances in silkworm cultivation. The promotion of tourism brought Shanghai people to enjoy newly developed parks around Lake Tai. Chapter 3 explores how urban elites took over management of Wuxi city during the turbulent 1920s, when militarists fought for dominance in China's wealthy Jiangnan (Lower Yangzi) region of which Wuxi is a part. Despite the destruction of Wuxi's main commercial zone during a 1925–26 war, recovery was swift. Chapter 4 addresses the administrative changes that accompanied the founding of the Nationalist government in nearby Nanjing in 1927. Like Christian Henriot in his study of Shanghai's 1930s administration, Lincoln argues that urban government in Wuxi under the Nationalist government was quite successful in introducing professional standards of planning and creating conditions favourable for economic development.Footnote ¹ Chapter 5 looks at the same period in Wuxi's hinterland, concluding that the state effectively extended its influence to rural areas through the establishment of public offices throughout the county, road building and flood relief. The Great Depression led to a downturn in Wuxi's economy, although Lincoln does not give a clear assessment of how serious the impact was. Neither does he discuss the implementation in Wuxi of the New Life Movement, the Nationalists’ major social reform initiative, launched in 1934.

One of the great contributions of this book is its discussion of the effects on Wuxi of the Japanese invasion and occupation of eastern China in 1937. Chapter 6 leads up to this topic, by examining the Wuxi native-place societies established in Shanghai, Suzhou and Nanjing. Lincoln argues that they represent further evidence that urbanization cannot be studied only by focusing on a city itself. Wuxi natives in Shanghai and elsewhere supported the county's development as conduits for investment and relief funds. The Japanese invasion in 1937 is a case in point. Shanghai's Wuxi native-place society provided money and organizational energy to help migrants return to Wuxi. Chapter 7 analyses the Wuxi economy under Japanese occupation, showing once again that recovery from wartime destruction was quite speedy. The Japanese attempted to dominate the economy, but Lincoln argues that Chinese businessmen were able to circumvent Japanese control to a considerable degree before 1942, smuggling silk cocoons and yarn to Shanghai's International Settlement to avoid selling to the Japanese at their low fixed prices. Mechanized silk reeling spread to households across the county, to avoid dependence on Japanese-controlled filatures. Urbanization continued under the Occupation; chapter 8 shows that the Japanese allowed Wuxi elites to manage the city itself, only taking over key infrastructure such as the electric company. Chinese officials oversaw the clean-up of corpses from the rivers. Chapter 9 examines the ‘qingxiang’ military campaigns the Japanese launched to clear the countryside of guerrilla resistance. They set up their headquarters in a small town, reorienting urban development to some extent, but furthering its reach. In the conclusion, Lincoln notes that the beginning of the Pacific War in late 1941 cut off Wuxi's connections to the global economy and tied it closely to Japan, with dire consequences.

In his introduction, Lincoln states that he believes scholars have failed to focus on the broad effects of urbanization in twentieth-century China because they are blinded by what he calls ‘rural–urban gap discourse’. In the conclusion, he adds that the ‘persistence of the influence of the rural–urban gap discourse on the historiography of China is perhaps one of the most distinctive features of Chinese urban history’ (p. 184). Instead of seeing cities and countryside in twentieth-century China as radically different, with the former shaped by technological innovation introduced under semi-colonial conditions and the latter stagnant, Lincoln argues for seeing a rural–urban continuum along which infrastructural, institutional and cultural influences steadily flowed. The clarity and force with which he makes the case is admirable, and it is to be hoped that urban historians of twentieth-century China take note.

On the other hand, in my view Lincoln does not pay enough attention to studies of Qing-era cities and how they were embedded in their hinterlands. He believes that China became an ‘urban-oriented society’ only in the early twentieth century (p. 2). But one could argue that the Jiangnan or Lower Yangzi region itself, of which Wuxi formed a part, had already been an urban-oriented society for a long time. Mark Elvin's work on the spread of towns across Jiangnan certainly suggests as much.Footnote ²

Urbanization was not a new phenomenon in twentieth-century China. But it was quite diverse. Antonia Finnane's study of Yangzhou in the early Qing demonstrates that that city, enriched by the salt trade, had very weak connections to the towns and villages in its hinterland.Footnote ³ Suzhou, on the other hand, which was a base for handicraft production using agricultural products, had very intense interactions with its neighbouring communities, as shown by Michael Marmé in his work on the Ming-era city.Footnote ⁴ It is something of a mystery, noted but not addressed by Lincoln, why Wuxi overtook Suzhou temporarily as an industrial powerhouse in the twentieth century. Was it because Wuxi's industrialists were more entrepreneurial and open to foreign ways than Suzhou's? Or did the smaller scale of Wuxi make it more amenable to the development of new-style industry? Lincoln's county-scale analysis offers a much-needed new perspective on urbanization, and we can hope that it will be matched in future with a broader regional approach that explores in more depth the uneven nature of urbanization across space and time.

Was twentieth-century urbanization in China different from urbanization in earlier times? Certainly, in some ways. There were continuities as well, however, and this book obscures those by restricting the timeframe largely to the years between 1912 and 1941. In particular, I would argue (and have argued) that long-established Chinese statecraft ideas led Chinese regimes from the imperial era to the present to draw administrative boundaries ‘not to encompass communities with common interests and levels of urbanization, but as much as possible to create standard units containing a mix of urban and rural conditions’.Footnote ⁵ This may help explain why Wuxi's industrialists and urban managers were not successful when, as Lincoln argues in chapters 3 and 4, they sought ‘autonomy’ by proposing special administrative districts – a ‘commercial settlement’ (shangbu 商埠, which might be better translated as ‘commercial development zone’) in the early 1920s and a Wuxi city government in the late 1920s. It is not clear what exactly this autonomy would have involved and whether it would actually have made a difference in how Wuxi developed, given Lincoln's argument that local magnates and the Nationalist (and later the Japanese-sponsored) developmental state had the same goals and many interpersonal connections. As Lincoln's study helps to show, there was a considerable degree of consensus among twentieth-century Chinese elites about policies in regard to economic development, and Chinese statecraft helped shape this consensus in some respects more than theories imported from abroad.

Lincoln makes a strong case for the value of ‘urbanization’ as a perspective from which to view twentieth-century Chinese history. Despite reservations about the temporal framework of the argument, I believe the book will be of great interest to scholars of Chinese history and urban history in general.