Sichuan As a Pivot: Provincial Politics and Gentry Power in Late Qing Railway Projects in Southwestern China

Chapter 11 Sichuan as a Pivot: Provincial Politics and Gentry Power in Late Qing Railway Projects in Southwestern China Elisabeth Kaske* Introduction While Yunnan is the focus of this volume, several of the chapters address the importance of Hubei (Hankou, Huguang) as a marketing area for Yunnanese copper and a source for immigrants (Greatrex, Huang, Yang). Ulrich Theobald discusses the importance of Sichuan for Yunnan’s connecting link with the Chinese heartlands. Nanny Kim’s paper on the Mayangzi type boats hints at the topographical difficulties of the passage through the Changjiang (Yangzi) Gorges. The present chapter is set at the end of the period under investigation in the early twentieth century, at a time when technological developments in steam and railway communication promised to make traveling less ardu- ous and create closer strategic and commercial bonds between China and its southwestern frontier provinces. But the early history of railway development in the Southwest also shows the formidable obstacles to the introduction of modern technology. The impediments were geographical: Rugged mountain slopes made railway construction forbiddingly expensive, and the rapids and currents of the upper Yangzi were overcome by steamship technology only in the second decade of the twentieth century. There were even more political limitations. The financial and technological superiority of the Western pow- ers stirred fears of imperialist domination in China. And while technological * Acknowledgements: Research for this chapter has, at various stages, been facilitated by Carnegie Mellon University’s Berkman & Falk faculty development grants, the Taiwan Fellowship, and the generous hospitality of the Institute of Modern History of Academia Sinica. Nanny Kim and Ho Hon-wai read and commented drafts of this paper. My thanks go especially to Nanny for very enlightening conversations on Sichuan’s transport situation and for creating the maps. I also wish to thank Maura Dykstra, Monica De Togni, and Zhou Lin for sharing unpublished work as well as archival sources with me, Matthias Kaun for help with finding electronic resources through CrossAsia, and Elise Yoder and Mary King for help with copy-editing. © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2018 | doi 10.1163/9789004353718_012 380 Kaske backwardness could be made up by imports, Chinese attempts to counter the “scramble for concessions” by establishing native railway companies revealed the gaping holes in China’s fiscal capacities, and the underdevelopment of its capitalist sector. Instead of mobilizing private resources to accelerate railway construction, the movement for native-financed railways unleashed centrifu- gal political forces that eventually tore the empire apart.1 This chapter will discuss plans for railway construction in Southwest China prior to World War I with a focus on the Sichuan-Hankou railway. In fact, a direct railway connection between Chongqing and Wuchang (which eventually swallowed the earlier city of Hankou) was not completed until 2010. But the line became important in two respects: In the long run, it established the myth of the Yangzi Gorges as the final frontier for modern technology. In the short run, Sichuan’s efforts to build a native-financed railway became a rallying point for other similar attempts, especially in Yunnan. The Sichuan-Hankou Railway Co. also gained notoriety in Sichuan’s Railway Protection Movement, which rose in opposition to the hapless attempt of the Qing government to nationalize and unify China’s fledgling railway system with the help of a loan from a consortium of British, German, American, and French financiers. The movement was one of the major triggers of the 1911 Revolution that precipi- tated the end of the Qing dynasty.2 There are two reasons for the central role of Sichuan in the Chinese railway movement. One was the strategic centrality of Sichuan in tying the southwestern frontiers to the Chinese heartlands. I will show in the first part of the chapter that the importance of the province, and especially the Gorges passage, did not emerge naturally out of its traditional role as the route for vital copper transports to the metropolitan mints. The heavily subsidized copper procure- ment from Yunnan had all but ceased after the mid-century Muslim uprising in Yunnan. At the same time, both Sichuan’s and Hubei’s economic and political importance in the structure of the Qing empire had grown. Sichuan, formerly a southwestern frontier province and recipient of subsidies in the Qing fiscal 1 The standard work on the Movement is: Lee En-han, China’s Quest for Railway Autonomy, 1904–1911: A Study of the Chinese Railway-Rights Recovery Movement (Singapore: Singapore University Press, 1977). 2 Charles Herman Hedtke, “The Szechwanese Railroad Protection Movement: Themes of Change and Conflict”, in Bulletin of the Institute of Modern History Academia Sinica, 6 (1977), pp. 368–369; Mary Backus Rankin, “Nationalistic Contestation and Mobilization Politics: Practice and Rhetoric of Railway-Rights”, in Modern China, 28/3 (2002), pp. 315–361; Zheng, Xiaowei, The Making of Modern Chinese Politics: Political Culture, Protest Repertoires, and Nationalism in the Sichuan Railway Protection Movement (Ph.D. Dissertation, University of California San Diego, 2009)..

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