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Law, Sovereignty, and the War on Smuggling in Coastal China, 1928–1937

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 December 2015

Philip Thai
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In October 1934, agents from the Chinese Maritime Customs Service received a hot tip that an otherwise unremarkable village off the coast of Shandong was hiding valuable contraband. A search party dispatched to investigate verified the claim after raiding several homes and uncovering sixty-nine bags of sugar. Seeking to add to this already sizeable haul, agents then scaled the walls of another home and discovered ten more bags hidden in the backyard. This time, however, they were met by incensed homeowner Yu Guangbo, who charged at the intruders with a pitchfork and seriously injured an officer when he tried to seize a handgun. His resistance was fierce but, ultimately, futile. Outnumbered, Yu was quickly subdued, beaten, and bound. Left alone in the village temple, he untied himself the next day before reporting his harsh treatment to a local court and inaugurating a lawsuit that would last almost a decade.

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Law and History Review , Volume 34 , Issue 1 , February 2016 , pp. 75 - 114
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Copyright © the American Society for Legal History, Inc. 2015 

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References

1. Xingzheng fayuan, ed., Xingzheng fayuan huibian (Compilation of Rulings by the Administrative Court) (hereafter XH) (Taibei: Chengwen chubanshe, 1972 [1948]), 33:83–84. Citation by case and page number.

2. The Nationalist regime refers to the Guomindang (GMD) party—also romanized as Kuomintang (KMT)—founded in 1912 by Sun Yat-sen. The “Nanjing decade” refers to the 10 year period before the Second-Sino Japanese War (1937–45) when the regime ruled from its new capital in the southern city of Nanjing.

3. For a sample of this scholarship, see: Prasenjit Duara, Culture, Power, and the State: Rural North China, 1900–1942 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1988); Kenneth Pomeranz, The Making of a Hinterland: State, Society, and Economy in Inland North China, 1853–1937 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993); Elizabeth J. Remick, Building Local States: China During the Republican and Post-Mao Eras (Cambridge: Harvard East Asian Monographs, 2004) and Regulating Prostitution in China: Gender and Local Statebuilding, 1900–1937 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2014); and Julia C. Strauss, Strong Institutions in Weak Polities: State Building in Republican China, 1927–1940 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998).

4. Notable exceptions include Lian Xinhao, Jindai Zhongguo de zousi yu haiguan jisi (Modern China's smuggling and the Maritime Customs antismuggling) (Xiamen: Xiamen daxue chubanshe, 2011); Sun Baogen, Kangzhan shiqi guomin zhengfu jisi yanjiu (1931–1945) (Research on the Republican government antismuggling during the War of Resistance period [1931–1945]) (Beijing: Zhongguo dang'an chubanshe, 2006); and Hans Van de Ven, Breaking with the Past: The Maritime Customs Service and the Global Origins of Modernity in China (New York: Columbia University Press, 2014).

5. Frederic Wakeman, “Models of Historical Change: The Chinese State and Society, 1839–1989,” in Perspectives on Modern China: Four Anniversaries, eds. Kenneth Lieberthal, Joyce Kallgren, Roderick MacFarquhar, and Frederic Wakeman (Armonk: M.E. Sharpe Inc., 1991), 68–102.

6. This new research revives an older research agenda on smuggling that focused on quantifying its scale. For examples, see: Cole, W. A., “Trends in Eighteenth-Century Smuggling,” The Economic History Review 10 (1958): 395–410Google Scholar; and Hoh-Cheung, and Mui, Lorna H., “Smuggling and the British Tea Trade before 1784,” American Historical Review 74 (1968): 44–73CrossRefGoogle Scholar. For a debate between Cole and Cheung and Mui, see their articles in The Economic History Review 28, 1 (1975)Google Scholar. Newer research on early modern history has uncovered how smuggling connected inter-imperial markets despite mercantilist policies designed to keep then apart. For a sample of this literature, see: Bernard Bailyn, Atlantic History: Concept and Contours (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2005); Alan Karras, Smuggling: Contraband and Corruption in World History (Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield, 2010); Michael Kwass, Contraband: Louis Mandrin and the Making of a Global Underground (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014); Linda M. Rupert, Creolization and Contraband: Curaçao in the Early Modern Atlantic World (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2012; Joshua M. Smith, Borderland Smuggling: Patriots, Loyalists, and Illicit Trade in the Northeast, 1783–1820 (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2006); and Thomas M. Truxes, Defying Empire: Trading with the Enemy in Colonial New York (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008). Newer research on modern history, meanwhile, has emphasized how suppressing cross-border transgressions such as smuggling actually helped states assert authority and protect finances. For a sample of this literature, see: Peter Andreas, Smuggler Nation: How Illicit Trade Made America (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013); Kornel Chang, Pacific Connections: The Making of the U.S.-Canadian Borderlands (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012); Cohen, Andrew W., “Smuggling, Globalization, and America's Outward State, 1870–1909,” The Journal of American History 98 (2010): 371–98CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Schayegh, Cyrus, “The Many Worlds of ˁAbud Yasin; or, What Narcotics Trafficking in the Interwar Middle East Can Tell Us about Territorialization,” American Historical Review 116 (2011): 273–306CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed; and Eric Tagliacozzo, Secret Trades, Porous Borders: Smuggling and States along a Southeast Asian Frontier, 1865–1915 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005).

7. For cases outside of China, see especially: Lauren Benton, Law and Colonial Cultures: Legal Regimes in World History, 1400–1900 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004); and Beverley, Eric Lewis, “Frontier as Resource: Law, Crime, and Sovereignty on the Margins of Empire,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 55 (2013): 241–72CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

8. In 1943, both the United States and Great Britain consented to the abolition of extraterritoriality in Free China to boost the political standing of their new wartime ally. During the same year, Japan consented to the abolition of extraterritoriality in occupied China to boost the prestige of new puppet regime.

9. Tagliacozzo, Secret Trades, Porous Borders.

10. See E. P. (Edward Palmer) Thompson, Whigs and Hunters: The Origin of the Black Act (New York: Pantheon Books, 1975); Douglas Hay, Peter Linebaugh, John G. Rule, Edward Palmer Thompson, and Cal Winslow, eds. Albion's Fatal Tree: Crime and Society in Eighteenth-Century England (New York: Pantheon Books, 1975).

11. The targeted rate was 5%, but the effective rate was often lower than 5%, because of exchange rate fluctuations. See Albert Feuerwerker, “The Foreign Presence in China,” in The Cambridge History of China: Republican China, 1911–49, Vol. 12, Pt. 1, ed. John K. Fairbank (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 180.

12. The Qing Court surrendered its tariff autonomy by agreeing to fix duties for British goods at 5% ad valorem under Article 21 in the Treaty of Tianjin (1858). The treaty's most favored nation clause obligated the court to extend similar concessions to other nations, effectively setting tariffs for all foreign goods at 5% ad valorem. The Beiyang government (1912–28), the previous Republican regime, initiated diplomatic negotiations to abolish this arrangement. On July 25, 1928, the United States formally consented to China's right to set tariffs on American imports. Great Britain and other foreign powers soon followed. Japan held out until 1930, before concluding a similar agreement with China. For more details, see Stanley F. Wright, China's Struggle for Tariff Autonomy, 1843–1938 (Shanghai: Kelly & Walsh, 1938).

13. All data from Trade of China (various issues) and Liang-lin Hsiao, China's Foreign Trade Statistics, 1864–1949 (Cambridge: Harvard East Asian Monographs, 1974). I use the symbol Ch.$ in this article to represent Chinese dollars or yuan.

14. Toru Kubo, “The Tariff Policy of the Nationalist Government, 1929–36: A Historical Assessment,” in Japan, China, and the Growth of the Asian International Economy, 1850–1949, ed. Kaoru Sugihara (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 145–76. For further details on the Nationalists' 1930s fiscal policies, see: Arthur N. Young, China's Nation-Building Effort, 1927–1937: The Financial and Economic Record (Stanford: Hoover Institution Press, 1971); Albert Feuerwerker, “Economic Trends, 1912–49,” in The Cambridge History of China: Republican China, 1911–49, Vol. 12: Pt. 1, ed. John K. Fairbank (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983); and Boecking, Felix, “The Bitterness of Fiscal Realism: Guomindang Tariff Policy, China's Trade in Imported Sugar, and Smuggling 1928–1937,” Harvard Asia Quarterly 13 (2011): 13–20Google Scholar. Opium monopolies created by the Nationalists (under the guise of “antiopium” movements) also helped fund the regime's campaigns against warlord and communist rivals. See Edward R. Slack, Jr., Opium, State, and Society: China's Narco-Economy and the Guomindang, 1924–1937 (Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press, 2000).

15. The organization and overall history of this important institution have been covered by many scholars. For a classic account of the agency's origins, see John K. Fairbank, Trade and Diplomacy on the China Coast: The Opening of the Treaty Ports, 1842–1854 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1953). For a comprehensive account in Chinese, see Chen Shiqi, Zhongguo jindai haiguan shi (History of the Maritime Customs in Modern China) (Beijing: Renmin chubanshe, 2002).

16. Charles Tilly, “War Making and State Making as Organized Crime,” in Bringing the State Back In, eds. Peter B. Evans, Dietrich Rueschemeyer, and Theda Skocpol (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985); and Van de Ven, Breaking with the Past, 220.

17. In one year alone during the nineteenth century, for example, fines were levied or confiscations effected on thousands of steamship passengers and crews, merchants, and importers, and other would-be smugglers landing at wharves or misrepresenting their shipments. Data tabulated from 2,565 cases in the “Fines and Confiscations” section of the Customs Gazette, January–March 1885, April–June 1885, July–September 1885, and October–December 1885.

18. Second Historical Archives of China (Zhongguo di er lishi dang'an guan) (hereafter SHAC), 679/26915, Inspector General Circular No. 4913, August 4, 1934.

19. Cai Zhitong, “Wo guo zousi wenti zhi jiantao” (A discussion of our nation's smuggling problem), Zhonghang yuebao (Bank of China Monthly) 12 (1936): 2.

20. Inspector General Robert Hart (in office 1863–1911) himself made this very point, noting that if Chinese steamship passengers carrying personal articles were “allowed to pass unquestioned and untaxed, Revenue would neither be diminished nor endangered.” SHAC, 679/26894, Inspector General Circular No. 488, February 18, 1890.

21. Variations of this risk–reward tradeoff was repeated for other commodities in numerous reports.

22. SHAC, 679/20403, Memorandum to Shanghai Commissioner, May 1, 1935 in Shanghai Dispatch No. 27344, June 12, 1935.

23. SHAC, 679/27750, Antung Dispatch No. 3011, May 20, 1929.

24. Those who sold or transported narcotics domestically could be sentenced to 3–10 years in prison and fined no less than Ch.$5,000. Importers, meanwhile, could be sentenced to life in prison or 5 years plus a fine of no less than Ch.$10,000, the harshest financial penalties in the Criminal Code. See Xu Bai, ed. Zhonghua Minguo fagui daquan (Complete Collection of Laws and Regulations of the Republic of China) (hereafter FD), (Shanghai: Shangwu yinshu guan, 1937), 1:150. Citation by volume and page number.

25. For salt and weapons, see FD 3:3178, 1:924, respectively. For silver and tungsten, see FD 4:415, 5:415–16, respectively.

26. For commentary on the late Qing Code, see Xue Yunsheng, Duli cunyi (Lingering Doubts after Reading the Sub-statutes) (hereafter DC), ed. Huang Jingjia (Taibei: Chinese Materials and Research Aids Service Center, 1970 [Qing]). Citation by serial number. Late Qing laws covering illicit trade fell into two categories. First, the “Taxes” (kecheng) chapter of the Qing Code was concerned with protecting state revenues. It required merchants to pay duties on products upon reporting to the local magistrate (DC, 146-00, 147-00) and restricted the private trade of commodities in which the court held a monopoly; for example, tea, alum, and, especially, salt (DC, 141-00, 144-00, 145-00). Second, the “Courier Stations” (guanjin) chapter of the Code banned the flow of specific commodities deemed as threats to internal security. Reflecting the court's fears of communities along continental and maritime frontiers “providing material assistance” (jieji) to pirates and other “treasonous bandits” (jiantu), the statute “Privately [Exporting] by Going beyond the Land Frontiers or by Sea in Violation of the Prohibitions” and its forty-one substatutes banned far more articles for export—for example, rice, timber, saltpeter, copper, iron, and precious metals—than articles for import; for example, weapons and narcotics (DC, 225-00). Punishments for “violating the ban on commodities” (weijin huowu) ranged from eighty strokes of the bamboo for unwitting accomplices to execution by beheading (chuzhan) for ringleaders (DC, 225-02, 225-03). Translation of chapter titles from The Great Qing Code by William Jones (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994).

27. The Qing Code consisted of statutes (lü) and substatutes (li). The former were sometimes retained as a formality even after they had become obsolete or had been supplanted by the latter. For more on this legal tradition, see Matthew H. Sommer, Sex, Law, and Society in Late Imperial China (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000).

28. DC, 225-00, commentary.

29. SHAC, 679/20403, Memorandum to Shanghai Commissioner, May 1, 1935 in Shanghai Dispatch No. 27344, June 12, 1935.

30. Guangdong Provincial Archives (Guangdong sheng dang'an guan) (hereafter GDPA), 95/1053, Pakhoi SR, June and July 1934, 4.

31. SHAC, 679/20362, Inspector General Dispatch No. 135367, June 15, 1931.

32. “Lifa yuanze” (Principle of legislation) Lifa zhuankan (Legislation magazine) 10 (1934): 1.

33. Zhongyang Ribao (Central Daily News), December 14, 1933, 3.

34. Zhongyang Ribao, November 3, 1934, 3.

35. FD, 3:3181–3.

36. Since the late 1920s, officials within the Nationalist government and Maritime Customs Service debated employing coastal raids in fighting smuggling, going as far as conducting a trial search and seizure operation in 1930 with the cooperation of the Chinese navy and local troops. The operation yielded sundries confiscated from homes and warehouses, and led to the capture of motorboats and junks used in smuggling. Senior officials in the Maritime Customs Service and the Ministry of Finance praised the operation; the latter asked the former to plan for more operations in the future. SHAC, 679/930, Inspector General Semi-Official Circular No. 67, 5 May 1930.

37. For more on legal reforms and their role in state-building: see Xiaoqun Xu, Trial of Modernity: Judicial Reform in Early Twentieth-Century China, 1901–1937 (Stanford: Stanford University Press. 2008); and Turan Kayaoglu, Legal Imperialism: Sovereignty and Extraterritoriality in Japan, the Ottoman Empire, and China (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010).

38. SHAC, 679/26915, Inspector General Circular No. 4926, August 23, 1934.

39. See, for example, Canton Dispatch No. 14333, April 13, 1935 and Chefoo Dispatch No. 7469, April 4, 1935 in SHAC, 679/27720.

40. SHAC, 679/6/1226, “IG Confidential Correspondence with Kuan-wu Shu, 1936,” “Confidential report of trip to Tsinanfu,” June 28, 1936 in Inspector General to Director General, June 30, 1936.

41. For negotiations with other warlords, see Van de Ven, Breaking with the Past, 247–51; and Emily M. Hill, Smokeless Sugar: The Death of a Provincial Bureaucrat and the Construction of China's National Economy (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2010).

42. GDPA, 95/1054, Kiungchow SR, June 1935, 2–4.

43. GDPA, 95/243, Kowloon Dispatch No. 10666, March 30, 1935.

44. SHAC, 679/27720, Lungkow Dispatch No. 576, April 3, 1936.

45. GDPA, 95/1053, Pakhoi SR, May 1935, “Appendix No. 1: Smuggling and Preventive Activities in Kwangchowwan,” 3–4.

46. Willem van Schendel and Itty Abraham, “Introduction,” in Illicit Flows and Criminal Things: States, Borders, and the Other Side of Globalization, eds. Willem van Schendel and Itty Abraham (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2005), 7, 15.

47. For more on extraterritoriality and nationalism in China, see Pär K. Cassel, Grounds of Judgment: Extraterritoriality and Imperial Power in Nineteenth-Century China and Japan (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012); Wesley R. Fishel, The End of Extraterritoriality in China (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1952); Fung, Edmund S. K., “The Chinese Nationalists and the Unequal Treaties 1924–1931,” Modern Asian Studies, 21 (1987): 793–819CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Mary C. Wright, “Introduction,” in China in Revolution: The First Phase, 1900–1913, (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1968).

48. Wu, C. C. (Wu Chaoshu), “Foreign Relations of the Chinese Nationalist Government,” Foreign Affairs 6 (1928): 668CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

49. See, in particular, Antony Anghie, Imperialism, Sovereignty and the Making of International Law (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005); Lauren Benton, A Search for Sovereignty: Law and Geography in European Empires, 1400–1900 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010); Cassel, Grounds of Judgment; Kayaoglu, Legal Imperialism; Stephen D. Krasner, Sovereignty: Organized Hypocrisy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999); and Teemu Ruskola, Legal Orientalism: China, the United States, and Modern Law (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2013).

50. Erik Esselstrom, Crossing Empire's Edge: Foreign Ministry Police and Japanese Expansionism in Northeast Asia (Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press, 2009), 127–28.

51. Barbara J. Brooks, “Japanese Colonial Citizenship in Treaty Port China: The Location of Koreans and Taiwanese in the Imperial Order,” in New Frontiers: Imperialism's New Communities in East Asia, 1842–1953, eds. Robert Bickers and Christian Henriot (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000), 111–12.

52. Although not focused on smuggling specifically, Lin, Man-houng examines similar strategies by overseas Chinese merchants. See “Overseas Chinese Merchants and Multiple Nationality: A Means for Reducing Commercial Risk (1895–1935),” Modern Asian Studies 35 (2001), 985–1009CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

53. See, for example: Soong, T. V. (Song Ziwen), “The Economic and Financial Reconstruction of China,” China Weekly Review 44 (1928): 280Google Scholar.

54. Benton, Law and Colonial Cultures, 211. For other cases of semicolonial polities embarking on legal reforms to reverse extraterritoriality, see Kayaoglu, Legal Imperialism.

55. For a critical look at the origins of this discourse, see especially Chen, Li, “Law, Empire, and Historiography of Modern Sino-Western Relations: A Case Study of the Lady Hughes Controversy in 1784,” Law and History Review 27 (2009), 1–54CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

56. Article XLVI, Treaty of Tianjin.

57. For text of the Joint Investigation Rules (in Chinese and English), see SHAC, 679/26890, Inspector General Circular No. 19 of 1868 (First Series), June 15, 1868.

58. Cassel, Grounds of Judgment. The tradition of allowing alien offenders in China to be punished by officials of their own nationalities stretches back to at least the Tang dynasty (618–907). See R. Randle Edwards, “Ch'ing Legal Jurisdiction over Foreigners,” in Essays on China's Legal Tradition, eds. Jerome Alan Cohen, R. Randle Edwards, and Fu-mei Chang Chen (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980), 222–69.

59. Kuo Ta-jen (Guo Songtao) to Marquees of Salisbury, June 8, 1876, Foreign Office (hereafter FO) 371/19322.

60. Shu Cheon Pon (Xu Shoupeng) to T. F. Bayard, July 2, 1887, Foreign Relations of the United States (hereafter FRUS), 1887–88, 242–43. Citation by year, volume, and page number. Secretary of State Bayard did not contest Xu's interpretation: “The Government of the United States fully recognizes the principles herein set forth, and has no desire to encroach upon the jurisdiction of China in the administration of her customs laws in respect to opium or other contraband merchandise.” See T. F. Bayard to Chang Yen Hoon (Zhang Yinheng), August 30, 1887, FRUS, 1887–88, 243.

61. Of the 2,656 cases of fines and confiscations from 1885, for example, not one of the 180 cases involving a non-Chinese national was settled using the rules. Individual fines for such cases usually ranged from 5 to 10 taels, although heavier penalties were levied for more egregious cases of misrepresentation.

62. SHAC, 679/26910, Inspector General Circular No. 4285, August 15, 1931.

63. Kuan-wu Shu Dispatch No. 7753, July 28, 1932 in SHAC, 679/26911, Inspector General Circular No. 4468, August 13, 1932.

64. For text of the treaty, see FRUS, 1928, II:475–77.

65. Wang Ching-wei (Wang Jingwei) to Nelson T. Johnson, March 7, 1934, FRUS, 1934, III:583.

66. British concessions in smaller treaty ports (e.g. Hankou, Jiujiang, Weihaiwei) were surrendered to the Nationalists in the late 1920s and early 1930s largely without a fight. See Robert A. Bickers, Britain in China: Community, Culture and Colonialism 1900–1949 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1999), 139–43.

67. Frederic Wakeman, Policing Shanghai, 1927–1937 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995). Tong Lam convincingly argues that the link between policing and recovering sovereignty in China had its roots in late Qing state-building programs at the turn of the twentieth century. See Lam, Tong, “Policing the Imperial Nation,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 52 (2010): 881–908CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

68. This new policy was eventually codified in the Preventive Law and implemented across China in 1934.

69. SHAC, 679/27723, Preventive Secretary to Chief Secretary, May 23, 1931.

70. Nelson T. Johnson to Frederick Maze, February 1, 1934, FRUS, 1934, III:579–81. The United States government believed that the treaty “did not accord to the Chinese Government any right to assume jurisdiction over the persons or property of American nationals.” See: William Phillips to Clarence E. Gauss, November 5, 1934, FRUS, 1934, III:586. For a history of the United States Court for China, see Eileen P. Scully, Bargaining with the State from Afar: American Citizenship in Treaty Port China, 1844–1942 (New York: Columbia University Press, 2001). For the introduction of American extraterritoriality in China, see Teemu Ruskola, Legal Orientalism.

71. C. W. Orde to Alexander Cadogan, July 8, 1935, FO 371/19322. The British Foreign Office maintained this position on the Joint Investigation Rules as early as 1927 in a memorandum on anticipated treaty revision with China. See Memorandum on Treaty Revision, January 6, 1927, FO 371/12459.

72. Hirota Kōki to Ariyoshi Akira, August 22, 1934, Nihon Gaikō Bunsho (Documents on Japanese foreign policy) (hereafter NGB) Showa II-1-3, 647. Citation by collection, volume, part, and document number.

73. For sample of such cases: SHAC, 679/28138, Shanghai SR, August 1932, 2–3; and Shanghai SR, October 1932, 1–5. Shen Bao, August 25, 1932, 15; and August 31, 1932, 15.

74. Shen Bao, October 12, 1932, 10.

75. Shen Bao, June 12, 1933, 11.

76. SHAC, 679/3/27757, Memorandum for Mr. E. A. Pritchard, April 20, 1936, 17.

77. Shen Bao, June 24, 1933, 12.

78. SHAC, 679/27723, Shanghai to Inspector General, November 21, 1934.

79. SHAC, 679/4135, Preventive Secretary's Notes (Jisi ke tongqi) (hereafter PN) No. 20, August 19, 1935, 5–13.

80. SHAC, 679/901, Memorandum for Commissioner, July 27, 1943.

81. Tianjin Municipal Archives (Tianjin shi dang'an guan), W1-1-2658, Tientsin SR, January 1937. Intelligence reports show how Customs officials closely monitored the operation of these firms. These firms—mostly Chinese and Japanese firms in foreign concessions with estimated operating capital from Ch.$1.0 million to Ch.$2.5 million each—ran very profitable businesses importing and selling smuggled sugar, artificial silk, and other products.

82. Such difficulties centered on the issue of proper jurisdiction of courts to hear smuggling cases. Two cases attracted particular attention from officials. On the Pinzhen case: SHAC, 679/28139, Shanghai SR, August 1935, 4–6. Shen Bao, August 21, 1935, 12; and Shen Bao, September 6, 1935, 15. On the Yisheng case: SHAC, 679/28139, Shanghai SR, November 1935, Appendix No. 2; and Shanghai SR December 1935, Appendix No. 3. Shen Bao, November 26, 1935, 10; and Shen Bao, November 27, 1935, 11.

83. “Annual Resume of Preventive Work for 1936,” in SHAC, 679/28140, Shanghai SR, December 1936, Appendix, 7.

84. Chen, “Law, Empire, and Historiography of Modern Sino-Western Relations,” 2.

85. Zhang Lai, Forward (bianyan) to Haiguan faze pingyi hui zhangze yi'an huibian (Compilation of the Regulations and Motions of the Customs Penalty Board of Inquiry and Appeal) (hereafter HH), ed. Haiguan faze pingyi hui (Customs Penalty Board of Inquiry and Appeal) (Publisher unknown, 1936). Citation by case and page number.

86. R. G. Howe to Alexander Cadogan, June 7, 1935, FO 371/19323.

87. For overview of how nineteenth century Western jurisprudence of sovereignty was linked to legal positivism, see Anghie, Imperialism, Sovereignty and the Making of International Law; and Kayaoglu, Legal Imperialism.

88. Like other semicolonial and native regimes, as Lam notes, China also “actively sought to remake [itself] by appropriating the logic and language of colonialism.” See Lam, “Policing the Imperial Nation,” 885, n. 14.

89. Benton, A Search for Sovereignty.

90. In 1907, for example, British ships from Hong Kong forced their way into the West River in Guangdong Province to search Chinese merchant ships in the name of combatting piracy and smuggling. See Lam, “Policing the Imperial Nation,” 894.

91. Van de Ven, Breaking with the Past, 242; and Wright, China's Struggle for Tariff Autonomy, 661–62.

92. SHAC, 679/26914, Inspector General Circular No. 4742, November 11, 1933.

93. Micah Muscolino, Fishing Wars and Environmental Change in Late Imperial and Modern China (Cambridge: Harvard East Asian Monographs, 2010), 108–9. For a brief overview of international discussions over the breadth of the territorial sea, see R. R. (Robin Rolf) Churchill and A. V. (Alan Vaughan) Lowe, The Law of the Sea, 3rd ed. (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1999), 77–79.

94. Muscolino, Fishing Wars, 116.

95. SHAC, 679/26910, Inspector General Circular No. 4241, June 5, 1931.

96. See articles 10, 11, and 12 of the Preventive Law.

97. Institute of Modern History Archives (Jindaishi yanjiu suo), Academia Sinica, Taiwan (Zhongyang yanjiu yuan), 11-10-04-03-028, “Haiguan jisi jie cheng an,” March 6, 1935.

98. Rebecca Karl, Staging the World: Chinese Nationalism at the Turn of the Twentieth Century (Durham: Duke University Press, 2002).

99. Until the late 1960s, the United Kingdom often issued protests affirming the 3-mile limit. See Lowe, A. V., “The Development of the Concept of the Contiguous Zone,” British Yearbook of International Law 51 (1981), 149Google Scholar (quoted from Churchill and Lowe, The Law of the Sea, 78).

100. Shidehara Kijūrō to Shigemitsu Mamoru, July 2, 1931, NGB Showa I-1-5, 991. To justify the 3-mile limit, the Japanese Foreign Ministry cited the recently ratified Convention between the United States and Japan Respecting the Regulation of the Liquor Traffic of 1930 (Shurei yusō torishimari ni kan suru jōyaku). Japan first learned of Chinese plans to extend its claim to the 12-mile mark from press reports. See Nanjing Consul Uemura to Shidehara Kijūrō, February 5, 1930, NGB Showa I-1-4, 817. In 1936, the Customs ordered preventive vessels to stay within the 3-mile limit as a precaution in the face of Japanese naval harassment. SHAC, 679/26917, Inspector General Circular No. 5307, July 7, 1936.

101. FRUS, 1931, III:971. The State Department cited Section 2760 of the Revised Statutes and Sections 581 and 586 of the Tariff Act of 1930. The United States' original designation of its 12-mile contiguous zone under the Tariff Act of 1922 also sparked international controversy since it was done unilaterally. For a brief overview on the concept of the contiguous zone, see Churchill and Lowe, The Law of the Sea, 132–40.

102. James C. Scott, Seeing like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998).

103. FD, 4:4846–50, 5:656–60. The regulations were promulgated in 1931 and revised in 1934 by the National Assembly.

104. This figure might understate the level of compliance, because re-registrations were not included. Data tabulated from PN (various).

105. HH, 1:29.

106. HH, 1:31–3.

107. For other cases, see: HH, 11, 12.

108. Emily Sohmer Tai, “Marking Water: Piracy and Property in the Premodern West,” in Seascapes: Maritime Histories, Littoral Cultures, and Transoceanic Exchanges, eds. Jerry H. Bentley, Renate Bridenthal, and Kären Wigen (Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press, 2007), 205–20.

109. Janice E. Thomson, Mercenaries, Pirates, and Sovereigns (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994), 13.

110. SHAC, 679/20385, Chefoo Commissioner's Comments on Tientsin Commissioner's Dispatch No. 9414, Undated.

111. Data tabulated from SHAC, 679/4135, PN (various). For 1930 and 1931 figures: SHAC, 679/27761, Letter from Inspector General to Kuan-wu Shu, October 3, 1935.

112. From 1932 to 1936, annual fines and confiscations at Shanghai, Tianjin, and Guangzhou averaged Ch.$1,300,000, Ch.$454,000, and Ch.$350,000, respectively. Average annual fines and confiscations during the same period at smaller ports were: Xiamen (Ch.$687,000) and Shantou (Ch.$424,000) in the south, and Zhifu (Ch.$683,000) and Longkou (Ch.$348,000) in the north.

113. SHAC, 679/4135, PN 10, August 30, 1933.

114. SHAC, 679/26912, Inspector General Circular No. 4626, May 13, 1933 and No. 4693, August 17, 1933.

115. See: J. A. (James A.) Sharpe, Crime in Early Modern England, 1550–1750 (London: Longman, 1998), 5; and Karras, Smuggling, 8.

116. The Umezu-Ho and Doihara-Chin agreements of June 1935 created a “demilitarized zone” in North China that formally expelled Nationalist military and political influence from the region. Customs stations that remained in the region had to disarm their staff and patrol teams. East Hebei and Chahar declared their autonomy from Nanjing in late 1935 and sought to import Japanese goods duty-free. For more details, see: Akira Iriye, “Japanese Aggression and China's International Position, 1931–1949,” in The Cambridge History of China: Republican China, 1911–49, Vol. 12, Pt. 2, eds. John K. Fairbank and Albert Feuerwerker (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986); Son Jun Sik, Zhanqian Riben zai Huabei de zousi huodong, 1933–1937 (Japan's Prewar Smuggling Activities in North China, 1933–1937) (Taipei: Guoshi guan, 1997); and Emily M. Hill, “Japanese-Backed Smuggling in North China: Chinese Popular and Official Resistance, 1935–1937,” in Resisting Japan: Mobilizing for War in China, 1935–1945, ed. David Pong (Norwalk: EastBridge, 2008).

117. At the suggestion of the Ministry of Finance and Maritime Customs officials, the Executive Yuan in June of 1936 made transacting smuggled goods punishable under Chapter 34, Article 349 of the Criminal Code: “Offenses of Receiving Stolen Property” (zangwu zui). Goods for which import duties had not been paid were now classified as “stolen property.” Recipients of such goods could be imprisoned for up to 3 years and fined up to Ch.$500. Others who transported, accepted in deposit, purchased, or otherwise aided in the disposal of illicit goods could be imprisoned for up to 5 years and fined up to Ch.$1,000. See SHAC, 679/26916, Ministry of Finance Dispatch No. 25983, June 8, 1936, in Inspector General Circular No. 5286, 1 June 1936. For “Offenses of Receiving Stolen Property,” see FD, 1:154.

118. The Revised Provisional Code Governing Punishments for Evasion of Customs Duty (Xiuzheng chengzhi toulou guanshui zanxing tiaoli) criminalized duty evasion for select high-value and frequently trafficked foreign products (e.g., sugar, rayon, and kerosene). Offenders could be sentenced to terms ranging anywhere from 3 years to life. The new law also specified that attempts to conceal, transport, or sell smuggled goods—successful or otherwise—were to be punished as actual infringements. Finally, those leading and inciting violence while resisting arrest or “conspiring with foreigners or rebels” in evading duties could be sentenced to life in prison or even death. For text of the law, see, FD, 5:479–80. As its name suggests, the law was enacted provisionally for 1 year from June 1936, although the Ministry of Finance extended it at least twice for 1 year periods in July of 1937 and 1938. See SHAC, 679/26917, Inspector Circular No. 5532, July 12, 1937; and SHAC, 679/26918, Inspector Circular No. 5703, July 26, 1938. The law was repealed by the Ministry of Finance under the Wang Jingwei regime in 1942. See SHAC, 679/9/5379, Inspector Circular No. 5814 (Bogus Customs), October 23, 1942.

119. For an overview and critique of this literature, see Green, Stuart P., “Why It's a Crime to Tear the Tag off a Mattress: Overcriminalization and the Moral Content of Regulatory Offenses,” Emory Law Journal 46 (1997), 1533–1615Google Scholar.

120. See, for example, SHAC, 679/27750, Memo No. 12 to Inspector General, “General Considerations Governing the Control of Smuggling and the Formation of a Preventive Service,” 1930.

121. Although financially harmful, such cases, as one commissioner happily noted, were still relatively “rare.” SHAC, 679/28140, Shanghai SR, March 1936, 4–5.

122. SHAC, 679/27720, Chinwangtao Dispatch No. 1241, April 3, 1935.

123. GDPA, 95/1055, Amoy SR, July 1936, 2.

124. SHAC, 679/27723, Chefoo Commissioner to Preventive Secretary, October 4, 1934.

125. Hong Shen, “Wu” (Tungsten), in Zousi (“Smuggling”) (Shanghai: Yiban shudian, 1937). The trafficked commodity in question is tungsten, a rare earth metal that enjoyed strong demand from war industries and whose export was expressly prohibited by the Nationalists.

126. For cases in Western Shandong, see SHAC, 679/28305, “Weekly Report,” May 5, 1937; May 12, 1937; and May 26, 1937. For the case of a coastal villager convicted under the Revised Punishment Code for concealing smuggled goods (thirty bags of sugar and twenty tins of matches) in his home, see GDPA, 95/1055, Amoy SR, August 1936, 16–7; and Amoy SR, October 1936, 10. For cases of sailors trafficking in sugar, silver, and rayon who were sentenced to prison from 1 to more than 3 years, see GDPA, 95/1056, Swatow SR, May 1937, 10–11. For a case of traffickers from two smuggling rings in Qingdao sentenced to prison sentences of various lengths (from a few months to life), see Shen Bao, February 3, 1937, 10.

127. GDPA, 95/1055, Swatow SR, September 1936, 6.

128. Xu, Trial of Modernity, 107–11, 172–73.

129. SHAC, 679/27720, Amoy Dispatch No. 9094, August 19. 1935.

130. GDPA, 95/1054, Kowloon SR, March 1935, 5.

131. FD, 1:151.

132. XH, 33:83–84.

133. XH, 33:85–87.

134. See, in particular, Jeffrey Herbst, States and Power in Africa: Comparative Lessons in Authority and Control (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000); and R. Bin Wong, China Transformed: Historical Change and the Limits of European Experience (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1997).

135. In Great Britain, indirect taxes—including customs duties and excise taxes—comprised a staggering 80% of total tax revenues by the reign of George III (1760–1820). The shift toward indirect taxation was comparatively less pronounced in eighteenth century France, but consumption was nonetheless also fiscalized. Indirect taxes jumped from roughly a quarter of the budget during the first half of the seventeenth century to approximately half in the eighteenth century, an impressive increase given the new direct taxes introduced during the reign of Louis XIV (1643–1715). By 1788, indirect taxes made up 57% of the budget. See Kwass, Contraband, 43. In the United States, customs duties made up approximately 57% of federal government tax revenues during the nineteenth century. The proportion was even higher during the antebellum period (1789–1861): more than 85%. Data calculated from Bureau of the Census, ed. Historical Statistics of the United States: Colonial Times to 1970, Bicentennial Edition (Washington, DC: Bureau of the Census, 1975), Y 352–57. In Germany, customs duties made up approximately 49% of total tax revenues from 1872, shortly after the country's founding, to 1914 on the eve of World War I. Data calculated from B. R. (Brian R.) Mitchell, International Historical Statistics: Europe, 1750–2000, 5th ed. (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), 830–38.

136. For the violent antismuggling campaigns in eighteenth century Great Britain, see Winslow, “Sussex Smugglers,” in Albion's Fatal Tree, 119–66; and John Brewer, The Sinews of Power: War, Money and the English State, 1688–1783 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1990). For eighteenth century France, see Kwass, Contraband. For nineteenth century United States, see Andreas, Smuggler Nation; and Cohen, “Smuggling, Globalization, and America's Outward State, 1870–1909.”

137. Nicholas R. Parrillo, Against the Profit Motive: The Salary Revolution in American Government, 1780–1940 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2013).

138. Andreas, Smuggler Nation; and Mann, Michael, “The Autonomous Power of the State: Its Origins, Mechanisms and Results,” Archives Européenes de Sociologie (European Journal of Sociology) 25 (1984): 185–213CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

139. Christopher A. Bayly, The Birth of the Modern World, 1780–1914: Global Connections and Comparisons (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2004), 247.

140. Charles Tilly, “Reflections on the History of European State-Making,” in The Formation of National States in Western Europe (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1975), 6.

141. Sheehan, James J., “The Problem of Sovereignty in European History,” American Historical Review 111 (2006): 1–15CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

142. See, for example: Gerald Strauss, Law, Resistance, and the State: The Opposition to Roman Law in Reformation Germany (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986); and Cassel, Grounds of Judgment. Some scholars have observed that smuggling strengthened centrifugal forces of regionalization. (See in particular: Hill, Smokeless Sugar; and Van de Ven, Breaking with the Past.) However, as this article has suggested, centripetal forces of centralization in fighting smuggling should not be overlooked.

143. Hendrik Spruyt, “War, Trade, and State Formation,” in The Oxford Handbook of Comparative Politics, ed. Carles Boix and Susan C. Stokes (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007).

144. See, in particular, Fung, “The Chinese Nationalists and the Unequal Treaties 1924–1931.”

145. Scully, Bargaining with the State from Afar, 168. For American attitudes toward extraterritoriality in China during the interwar years, see Scully, Bargaining with the State from Afar. For British attitudes, see Bickers, Britain in China.

146. Jurisdictional responsibilities over minor and major cases of smuggling were more clearly delineated between the judiciary and the customs, but the decision to fine and confiscate remained the sole prerogative of commissioners. Individuals dissatisfied with the penalties levied by the customs were permitted to appeal their cases in accordance with procedures that echoed those of the old Customs Penalty Board of Inquiry and Appeal. See Haiguan Zongshu, ed. Zhonghua Renmin Gongheguo zanxing haiguan fa (Provisional Customs Law of the People's Republic of China) (Beijing: Renmin chubanshe, 1951), ch. 17, Art. 185–89.

147. Renmin Ribao (People's Daily), April 21, 1951, 1.