Technology and Culture

In a widely-read essay entitled Beloved China, its author recounted in 1935 an episode aboard a steamship on the Yangtze River belonging to a "J-company" when several ticketless Chinese passengers were physically and sexually assaulted under the order of ship's management. The author used it as an allegory of Mother China being bullied and dismembered by greedy imperialist powers. As Anne Reinhardt confirms in her book Navigating Semi-Colonialism, steamship journeys were for provincial Chinese often the moment of awakening to their country's compromised sovereignty.

In this innovative book, Reinhardt examines political, economic, social, and cultural aspects of modern China's treaty system through the lens of domestic steamship navigation. Starting with its introduction by the British in the mid-nineteenth century, the book largely follows a familiar political timeline, for good reasons: the establishment and expansion of treaty system by Britain and others in the 1860s set the parameters for steamship operation inside modern China. Although the country's semi-colonial status remained largely unchanged until the 1940s, the entry of Japan after its victory over China in 1895, the fall of Qing government in 1911 and the subsequent absence of a viable central government, and the consolidation of the Nationalist government after 1927 brought changes to steam navigation in China in both immediate and gradual ways. Making brief comparison with shipping in colonial India in each of these phases, the book shows that "both sides of the hyphen" of China's semi-colonial status mattered: the colonial condition helps explain that despite their different nationalities, leading shipping companies—British, Chinese, and Japanese—entered into a shipping conference and followed identical practice in ship-board management and customer service. Yet the Chinese authorities and businessmen were able to exert influence, if somewhat inconsistently, in ways impossible in colonial India.

Unlike previous histories of steam shipping in China, Reinhardt investigates steamships as social spaces in order to understand how the Chinese experienced the treaty system. She highlights racial hierarchy and exclusion but also collaboration. Steamship captains and engineers were almost invariably Western (and later, Japanese). Chinese compradors shared the risk by taking over responsibilities for domestic passengers and cargo; they hired large numbers of teaboys—in some cases equaling the number of paid passengers—in order to make a profit. In passenger service, four major companies each reserved a special class exclusively for Westerners and three classes for Chinese. In particular, the Chinese third class constituted [End Page 910] what she calls "alienated space," where chaos and filth were common and were attributed to the prevalent stereotypes of John Chinaman who were unable to be governed and unable to govern.

As Reinhardt demonstrates, in semi-colonial China, as in formal colonies like India, technological competence was perceived as part of the Western superiority over the native population. It was not until the late 1920s when the Nationalist Government of China launched the program to promote local talent and a newly-established Chinese company introduced new management practices that the uniform technological hierarchy on steamships began to break down: Chinese shipping companies began hiring Chinese captains and engineers, while British companies opened lower technical positions to the Chinese.

The introduction of steam navigation to China in the second half of the nineteenth century was part of the global "communication revolution," albeit with local variations. This was in part a negotiation with nature: the Chinese hinterland along the Upper Yangtze was initially beyond the reach of steamships, and new ships suitable for shallow water and rapids had to be built. However, as the author shows, the geographical reach of the steamships in China had much to do with politics and economics, as initially, the Qing government's decision was to limit steamships—foreign or Chinese—to treaty ports. Reinhardt provides further evidence that this had less to do with the conventional portrayal of the Chinese officialdom's inherent resistance to modern technologies...