The Salt Merchants of Tianjin 
Subtitle: State-Making and Civil Society In Late Imperial China
Publisher: University of Hawaii Press
Published: April 2001
Language: eng
Format: Hardcover
Number of pages: 256
ISBN-13: 9780824822750
Subjects: Asian / Middle Eastern history: c 1500 to c 1900; Social history; History; History - General History; History: World; Asia - China; Commerce; Economic History; Public Policy - City Planning & Urban Dev; China; Government monopolies; Merchants; Political activity; Political aspects; Salt industry and trade; Tianjin
Description: "In this the first detailed study in English of the mercantile activities and social role of Tianjin's salt merchants, Kwan Man Bun reveals how they helped stabilize the city and assumed many civic responsibilities, providing relief, charities, and other services to their fellow citizenry.

Although these developments resemble the emergence of an idealized "public sphere" as in Europe, Kwan makes clear that Tianjin's social changes were not grounded on "rational discourse" but rather drew their strength and continuity from merchant networks based on exclusivity, wealth, education, and kinship. Modernity, moreover, was not kind to this local articulation of Chinese "civil society." While the city endured the ravages of civil war and foreign invasions in the late Qing, both officials and intellectuals advocated the reassertion of state authority to re-create a strong and corporatist state capable of revitalizing the country.

The forced bankruptcy of several leading salt merchants and the re-nationalization of their monopolies in 1911 signaled a fundamental shift in state-society relations, abrogating in the process centuries of "useful compromises" that had once integrated the two."--BOOK JACKET.