Philip Thai's new book on smuggling and the origins of the modern Chinese state explains a seemingly contradictory relationship between crime and state building: smugglers, in his analysis, were ultimately responsible for the strengthening of the Chinese state's control over society. In this creatively researched and tightly argued monograph, Thai employs the rubric of “economic life” to bind together the disparate stories of intellectuals, imperialists, merchants, middlemen, politicians, police, and customs officers into a colorful and coherent narrative about the emergence of a powerful, intrusive state that was hellbent on controlling and profiting from commerce.

Thai approaches smuggling as an opportunity to learn more about how people participate in the economy and how states view and react to this economic activity. Smuggling, in this frame of analysis, is merely another name for trade that someone in power has decided is illicit, either because of an outright prohibition of the commodity or because of the evasion of taxes. Questions about how and why states make these decisions, and how and why people choose to obey or disobey state restrictions on trade, can undergird a wide range of potential avenues for research. For Thai, what is most interesting here is how “smuggling and its suppression fitfully but progressively expanded state power” (p. 19). In arguing this point, Thai makes important contributions across the fields of Qing, Republican, and PRC history, and his book will be required reading for scholars and students of late imperial and modern China. Scholars of crime, capitalism, and state building in other regions of the world should also be encouraged to read this detailed but accessible portrait of modern Chinese economic life.

China's War on Smuggling is organized into seven roughly chronological chapters. Chapter 1 sets the stage by mapping out the legal and institutional history of smuggling and anti-smuggling in the late Qing and early Republic. Chapter 2 then delves into the forgotten history of tariff autonomy, a hugely important issue that Thai has rescued from the dustbins of historians overly focused on extraterritoriality and indemnities as the hallmark features of semi-colonialism in China. Regaining tariff autonomy was a major triumph for Chiang Kai-shek's government, and as Thai skillfully illustrates, the higher taxes and stricter enforcement that followed were the catalysts for the smuggling crisis of the 1930s (the subject of chapters 3–4 and the heart of the book). Chapter 3 is a top-down legal and institutional history of the crisis. Consistent with the basic chronological argument of the book, the emphasis here is on the long-term consequence of expanded state control. Conflicts that emerged between the central state and local authorities over implementing anti-smuggling policies should not be understood as symbols of the government's failure, Thai argues, because they were “byproducts of a more assertive central state projecting its authority in new ways and venues” (p. 100). Chapter 4 then reconstructs the crisis first from the perspective of smugglers themselves, then through the lens of popular culture. The early portion of this chapter is especially rich, capturing the subtle dynamics of rayon, sugar, and kerosene smuggling and the complex ways that the people involved in each branch of the smuggling trade were bound up in larger processes.

The remainder of the book takes us through the war with Japan, the Chinese Civil War, and into the first two decades of the People's Republic. Chapter 5 examines the complex jurisdictional map of wartime China, resituating economic blockades as an important feature in the long history of smuggling. Chapter 6 is nominally about the Civil War, but the Communists are largely absent and it reads more as a history of the Nationalist attempts to reassert control over the economy after Japan's surrender. The most exciting new evidence here concerns grassroots attempts to reestablish interregional trade in the uncertain postwar atmosphere. Traders, it is no surprise, were nimbler than states in responding to new and evolving conditions. Chapter 7 then brings us into the ambitious state-building years of the early PRC, arguing that smuggling was not rooted out, perhaps due to the way that it worked as a “lubricant that smoothed the frictions generated by the tumultuous transition to socialism” (p. 242). The breadth of this final chapter is impressive, and Thai identifies a number of important subjects that deserve further research: the history of smuggling among ethnic minority populations and returning overseas Chinese in the early PRC, the interaction between anti-smuggling institutions and state-owned enterprises (which were dependent on smuggled goods), and the black-market culture that sprang up as a direct consequence of the fatal Great Leap famine of 1959–61.

China's War on Smuggling is methodologically ambitious, shifting between “top-down” state-centric explanations of anti-smuggling policy and “bottom-up” explorations of the individuals whose lives and actions intersected with anti-smuggling institutions. Still, from beginning to end Thai makes it clear that even when he is examining nonstate actors, what he is most interested in explaining is the amplification of state power over time. His prioritization of this narrative gives the book a sharp focus and a coherent identity. Historians interested in the social lives and identities of the smugglers themselves will have to make do with some compelling—though ultimately fleeting—glimpses at that most intriguing of underworlds.