Law, State Building, and the War on Smuggling in Coastal China

This paper examines the relationship between state-building and the policing of trade in China during the Nanjing Decade (1927-37) through the Nationalists’ war on smuggling. Recovery of tariff autonomy and the introduction of protective duties during the 1930s provided the Nationalists critical fiscal resources to construct a modern state. It also, however, created a veritable smuggling epidemic that threatened both government revenue and public security. To combat smuggling, the Nationalists responded with an aggressive expansion of its administrative, technical, and legal infrastructure almost without precedence in Chinese history. Using legal cases and codes, customs archives, and popular press reports, this paper examines one important dimension of this war on smuggling: the legal context that defined the crime of “smuggling” and governed the treatment of merchants and other individuals. This paper has three important aims. First, this paper shows how the fight against smuggling dovetailed with the Nationalists’ project of state-building through the extension of central-level authority and assertion of sovereignty despite the uneven progress, intense resistance, and unintended consequences it produced.  Second, it complements the state-centered perspective by considering the many responses by merchants and “smugglers” to the regulation, taxation, and policing of trade and illustrating how they adapted to changing economic conditions or evaded strict political controls. More generally, this paper also suggests how suppressing illicit maritime activities was — in addition to collecting taxes more efficiently and effectively — critical to modern states’ ability to assert sovereignty, enforce borders, and extend control over different strata of society and economy.