Tales from a Small North China Commercial Town

In the early 1930s Gaoyang (in Hebei province) was the center of one of China’s best known rural industrial districts, producing cotton and rayon textiles that were sold through a nation-wide marketing network. My own earlier work on Gaoyang, A Chinese Economic Revolution: Rural Entrepreneurship in the Twentieth Century, traced the prewar development of the industrial district and charted its fate during the socialist era and following the rebirth of private industry from the 1980s to 2000. The talk I am going to give returns to Gaoyang of the 1930s, making use of a rich set of “lost” materials to chart the impact of rural industrialization on local society. The materials are the original fieldwork notes of a two-year long sociological study of Gaoyang directed by the sociologist Chen Xujing of the Nankai Economic Research Institute and funded by the Rockefeller Foundation from 1935-37. My presentation will introduce the materials, briefly describe what they tell us about the “boom” town of Gaoyang in the early 1930s and discuss several “tales” as an indication of the kind of research that can be done with the new materials. One of the “tales” examines the local government’s use of lotteries to finance essential tasks when it had insufficient revenue, and the second takes up the question of smuggling and the clash between the patriotic sentiments of the business community and their economic interests.