Selda Altan’s book on the history of Chinese workers in the French colonial railway project is an important contribution to the study of Chinese labor. It engages with previously separate historiographies of Chinese labor history and Chinese migration history to deepen our understanding of how the multifaceted interactions of imperialism shaped Chinese labor in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.The Yunnan-Indochina Railway was conceived in the 1890s by French colonial officials and businessmen to connect the colonial economy of Tonkin with southwestern China in order to intensify French colonial and business interests in China. The 1885 French annexation of Tonkin, which shared a border with Yunnan province in southwestern China, coincided with increasing French reliance on Chinese silk imports after the collapse of the Lyon silk industry in 1852. French colonial officers took the lead in securing private and public sources of French capital, and treaty agreements with the Chinese state. But the construction and management of the railway was divided between the French colonial government and the French Company of the Yunnan-Indochina Railway, established in 1901. The former oversaw the railway line inside French Indochina and the latter the railway inside Qing China.Construction of the railway began in 1903, though recurring labor shortages quickly halted its progress. Despite the global system of Chinese indentured labor recruitment and the unscrupulous methods of recruiting contractors, the company failed to secure a reliable supply of labor. Numerous factors accounted for this failure. Yunnan had a smaller population than other provinces in southern and northern China, and it did not have an established custom of migration. Moreover, the interventions of French agents in the ethnic politics of Yunnan alienated numerous groups. More importantly, the terms of employment that the company offered simply could not compete with what British and Dutch companies offered. Wages were significantly lower, working conditions dangerous, and living conditions poor. Indeed, many recruits succumbed to diseases or fatal work injuries, and those who survived left. Desertion, which Altan interprets as resistance, was common. For instance, in January 1905, the company aimed to recruit 1,000 men from neighboring Guangxi province but only managed to recruit 430, many of whom did not work for more than three days (82).To extract more labor power from its recruited workers, the company turned to colonial medicine and exploitative foremen. The company established hospitals, clinics, and even training programs in Yunnan to prolong the working life of its recruited workers. It also tolerated the abusive behavior of Italian foremen toward Chinese workers. Altan described several occasions on which Italian foremen fatally beat or shot Chinese workers, without bearing the consequences. Extraterritoriality exempted the Italian foremen from Qing laws, while the racial thinking of French managers and consul officers excused the foremen’s abuses on account of assumed Italian emotional volatility and Chinese incompetence or laziness.When the railway was finally completed in March 1910, the company was almost bankrupt. Construction cost much more than they had anticipated, and the company lost its workforce in an antidynastic rebellion in Hekou. The Qing government had either conscripted Chinese railway workers for its military force to suppress the rebels or arrested those it suspected of participating in the rebellion. The company’s demand for compensation from the Qing government eventually strained relations between Qing China and France, and between the French government and the company. Not surprisingly, the French and Chinese governments refused to bail the company out and take over the railway.The book relies on extensive use of French archival sources for its detailed account of French actors and their motivations. This account successfully disambiguates the nature of French imperialism in Qing China. It highlights differences between branches of the French colonial state and even agents of French mining and railway companies, while locating the debates and decisions of the French empire within the global dynamics of transimperial competition. But the book overlooks the significance of transimperial connections in contributing to the expansion of French imperial influence and presence in Asia. The research done separately by Monica Gines-Blasi and Xavier Huetz de Lemp reveals unexpected collaboration between Spanish and French colonial agents in the recruitment of indentured Chinese labor from southern China and their deployment to the French and Spanish Empires in Southeast Asia and elsewhere. The Chinese workers recruited for the Yunnan-Indochina railway were undoubtedly part of this regional circulation of labor.Obtaining a fine-grained picture of workers is one of the challenges in writing Chinese labor history of this period. The mobility of the workers and the absence of textual records account for this difficulty. Altan commendably overcomes this challenge through her careful reading of multilingual sources grounded in her impressive facility with multiple languages and theoretical sophistication. The final chapters on the railway workers in Chinese nationalist discourse exemplify both traits. These chapters provide a critical reading of the writings of early Chinese nationalist activists, showing how railway workers featured prominently in the nationalists’ critique of imperialism but were completely absent in the nationalists’ mobilization. The early nationalist activists’ dismissal of the railway workers in discourse and reality foreshadowed practices of subsequent Chinese nationalists.Perhaps it is in reaction to nationalists’ slight of the workers’ agency that the book overcompensates in its claims about labor subjectivities and solidarities. Take, for instance, the claim that “workers began to form a collective identity” in their journey from native place to worksite, as “their communal bonds were strengthened during their trip and continued after the arrival at the worksites, turning them into a unified group that posed a threat to both Qing administrators and French officials” (85). How was this collective identity expressed, beyond desertion? Was this group unified in the eyes of the workers or the Qing administrators and French officials? The book does not address these questions. But these occasional missteps do not undermine the importance of this book or diminish Altan’s accomplishments.
Limin Teh (Fri,) studied this question.