The Inventions of China

THIS CHAPTER EXAMINES MODERNITY FROM a trans-Pacific perspective, with a focus on the interdependent formations of China and the West vis-à-vis the development and control of infrastructures cohering around and through letters. Starting in Guangdong, struggles over technological change at this time mediated, as they were mediated by, imperialist and civil wars happening in China to control land and resources and to define national identities in an era of intensified global colonial and anticolonial ambitions in East Asia. As battles to develop and mobilize communication and transportation infrastructures in China operated as the literal form of modern statecraft and empire, these battles were inseparable from, and made fully manifest by, transformations in knowledge production — the latter also revolving around discourses of paper and print technologies. Such epistemological movements sought to invest or reorganize human meaning in competing articulations of space and thereby normalize changing operations of power in and through the architecture of social life. As the specificities of these productions of constraint and opportunity thrust migrants from Guangdong to the Anglo settler state of California, conflicting ideological imperatives of nascent nationalisms and regional capitalisms, also mediated through infrastructures of the epistolary, exacerbated global crisis and its particular manifestation in California. These contradictions culminated in the emergence of structured exclusions in order to reform rather than resolve the crisis, producing a paradigm of human detention and Angel Island as a spatial suture for differentiated processes of homogenization and unreconciled systems of global exploitation.

CIVILIZATION AND PRINTED PAPERS

This journey begins in the 1870s in Guangdong, a southern province in China, during a period of transforming social investments in paper, print, and postal technologies. At the emergent nation-state scale, these transformations both reflected and facilitated the mass displacements and reorganization of land occurring as a result of wars between and among Chinese, Japanese, U.S., and European imperialists, in addition to competing Chinese nationalist parties and, most relevant at the rural and local levels, an array of patrilineal clan groups. The standing Qing empire, led by descendants of the Jin dynasty (ca. 265–420 c.e.) identified ethnically as Manchu, rose to power in 1644 as an inclusive empire formally recognizing the Han majority as well as ethnic minority populations. Of primary concern for the purposes of this analysis are the circumstances surrounding late Qing reforms: from the 1850s to 1911, political struggles included escalating civil war with regional ethnic uprisings, warlordism, and the Taiping Rebellions targeting both European missionary and Qing government authorities; military conflict with Britain, Japan, and France; lower intensity warfare with the United States, Russia, Austria, Portugal, and Germany; and attempts to secure the Qing government's own imperial assets in Korea, Vietnam, Burma, and Taiwan. With such pressures thus bringing the Qing dynasty beyond the brink of crisis, imperial reformers launched the Self-Strengthening Movement (1860–95), instituting sweeping structural adjustments based on deliberations of how best to appropriate Western technologies to promote Chinese imperialism. It is in this context that design and control over print and postal infrastructures in China marked a primary arena through which imperialist and anti-imperialist struggles were unfolding.

This investigatation of such sweeping changes thus starts with situating them within everyday traditions and practices indigenous to villages in Guangdong at this time, where paper already possessed long-standing social meaning and sacred value. In her studies of Han Chinese folk tradition, Janet Lee Scott argues that paper itself, distinct from Holy Scripture such as the Bible or the Qu'ran, acted as "the material aspect, the physical representation of worship and belief." In such social and spiritual practices, paper and its making, offering, and burning serve as means to communicate and maintain relationships with gods, ghosts, ancestors, and the natural world. Moreover, respect for the paper, hierarchized by perceived quality and inclusive of specific categories for paper bearing characters or print, mediates and coheres particularized worldviews of an ontological totality. As Roderick Cave further contextualizes, "The value of paper bearing written or printed characters is recognized in the pious Confucian motto, 'Respect scrap paper bearing characters' (jingxi zizhi), the Buddhist tradition that special rewards will be earned by those who respect and preserve paper bearing sacred messages, and the Daoists' plentiful use of paper charms." These values assigned to paper by Guangdong communities corresponded with the venerated craft of papermaking, the latter involving intricate rituals of collective labor, cooperative living during the papermaking season, and production synchronized with the vaster ecology to ensure optimal climactic conditions and access to water and fibers.

By the 1870s, however, the importation of the mechanical printing press to the colonized territories of Shanghai introduced commercial modes of both print and papermaking that expanded alongside preexisting methods and began exerting uneven pressures for government control, deskilling, and transformation of production processes. Prior to this time, Qing rulers resisted the importation of Western printing technology for cultural, financial, and aesthetic reasons. Market-oriented industrialization did not begin in Shanghai until 1876–77, after Chinese entrepreneurs experimented with Western-style lithography first imported by Catholic missionaries to print religious imagery. By 1895, this mechanization of print media, alongside the prototype for the organization of production that commercial industrialization introduced, created a mass culture connected to Shanghai's publishing industry and spreading through print news and modern periodicals. Such changes occurred through a distinct "Chinese" nationalist print capitalism that syncretized Western techniques of production and "progress" with imperialist Chinese print and political culture, the latter rooted in existing social hierarchies and values of public service embodied by the government scholar and literati elites.

Rather than exemplify a democratic encounter between systems in a globalizing world, this hybridity took shape as Western Allied Forces colonized China by means of occupying the Qing government itself — prompting the historian John L. Fairbank, for instance, to reflect that...