Chinese Workers of the World

Altan’s new book is an imaginative study of how Chinese railroad workers in the Yunnan-Indochina borderlands helped build the modern world. It introduces a new direction in Chinese labor history that takes us away from coastal treaty ports into the hinterland, where European colonialism was pushing north from Southeast Asia into southwestern China. By focusing on the French-led construction of the Yunnan-Indochina Railway in the early 1900s, the book challenges a Euro-centric theory that defines class struggle as the necessary marker of workers’ consciousness, expanding the framework to include refusals to realize one’s “productive capacity in the service of capital,” such as mass desertions, as generative of political identity (13).Centering on the everyday resistance of railroad workers who left few physical records about themselves, the book also offers an astute reading of European colonist and Chinese nationalist sources, most notably of the underused French archives about the overseas empire and the railway company. The brutality of work conditions was summarized in the observation “the coolies were dying like flies,” suggesting how racial and class exploitation and epidemics were as lethal to Asian labor as frustrating to colonial and capitalist ambitions (5). By the end of construction, Altan notes, at least 12,000 of 65,000 Vietnamese and Chinese workers had died, while the promise of financial and political expansion remained largely unfulfilled. In the end, the railway was sold to the Chinese government in 1945.The first four chapters, which compose the bulk of the book, discuss French colonial-capitalist views and control of the railway, offering a critical examination of them. The last two chapters consider Chinese nationalist and revolutionary engagement with railways and labor. The first four chapters examine how the railway project proposed to resolve conflicting needs in the wake of Sino-French War of 1884/5—French consolidation in the Tonkin, domestic debates between free trade expansionism and industrial protectionism, and interimperial rivalries with Britain in Asia and Germany in Europe. At the same time, the “Yunnan myth,” promising unobstructed access to its mineral wealth and Chinese markets, drew French investments across the Tonkin border. Yet resistance from local miners, Qing assertiveness and interventions, a nascent Chinese nationalism, labor shortages, and mass mortality all served to slow and complicate French interests. In response to these challenges, the authorities tried to spread influence among Yunnan’s Muslim communities by connecting them with the Middle Eastern Muslims under French rule and coopting a rising pan-Islamist movement to pursue a cosmopolitan vision of “peaceful penetration” rather than military conquest. They also used medicine, policing, and sanitation to lay claim to a civilizing modernity and the laboring body. However, Altan finds, these measures yielded little results. Instead, workers often found ways to avoid or defy control.The final two chapters turn to Chinese perspectives on the railway and labor in the quest for nationhood. Drawing on the Yunnan Journal, which was founded by Japan-based students, and the local history of nationalist agitation and the 1908 Hekou Rebellion, Altan uncovers the lost opportunity for labor to occupy the early Chinese revolutionary imaginary. Instead, leaders were largely consumed by the task of recovering the nation’s land (guotu) rather than that of mobilizing labor. A “territorial nativism” in the form of nationalization of foreign-built railways therefore dominated and narrowed China’s struggle against imperialism.This book is a fascinating and attentive read of the conflicts between colonialism, nationalism, and migrant labor, where intersections with race, industry, the law, and health stood out. The Yunnan-Indochina area under study also bore the signatures of a borderland, where French investors, Italian contractors, Han and non-Han miners, Vietnamese nurses, and Chinese physicians were as much part of the environment as Chinese workers. Readers with an interest in global racial capitalism, as well as in how modern Chinese history has a Southeast Asian dimension and in how colonial Southeast Asian history also has a Chinese one, will benefit from this impressive study

Archaeology · China · Colonialism · Geography · Chinese history and philosophy · Migration, Ethnicity, and Economy · Vietnamese History and Culture Studies