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‘Winning the Peace’: The Chinese Maritime Customs Service, foreign technocrats, and planning the rehabilitation of post-war China, 1943–1945

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 December 2021

Jiayi Tao Open the ORCID record for Jiayi Tao [Opens in a new window]
Jiayi Tao*
Affiliation:
Department of History, University of Bristol, Bristol, United Kingdom and Department of History, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, Shanghai, China
*
Email: janice3713@sjtu.edu.cn
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Abstract

Through the lens of the multinational staff of the Chinese Maritime Customs Service (CMCS), this article argues that a technocratic programme of reconstruction evolved in the Nationalist government's wartime efforts on post-war planning, which refashioned a cadre of foreign (semi-)colonial-era experts into technocrats serving a sovereign state. This episode, in which the weakened Customs Service reclaimed its significance for the Chinese state, occurred in China's wartime capital, Chongqing. After the abrogation of the so-called ‘unequal treaties’ with foreign powers in January 1943, China entered a post-treaty era, and the question of retaining long-serving foreign Customs Service employees perplexed Nationalist leaders. Eventually, China's huge post-war need for foreign expertise, networks, and imports led to a moderate staff reorganization of the CMCS, with foreign technocrats being kept on and other bureaucrats either shifted to advisory positions or being forced to retire. Technical expertise provided a new guise for the European and American presence in post-imperialist China. Taking the rehabilitation of coastal lighthouses as an example, this article demonstrates the significance of foreign technocrats to the Chinese state during the last phase of the Sino-Japanese War and in its immediate aftermath. In showing the ambition and preparations of the Nationalist government for a post-war era, this article corrects a narrative of an all-out collapse of the Nationalist government from the mid-1940s. The wartime evolution of the Customs Service further highlights the growing importance of technocrats in the decolonizing world.

Keywords

Post-war planningChinathe Chinese Maritime Customs Servicethe Second World Warexpert
Type
Research Article
Information
Modern Asian Studies , Volume 56 , Issue 6 , November 2022 , pp. 1930 - 1950
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Copyright
© The Author(s), 2021. Published by Cambridge University Press

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52 Little's comments, 6 September 1944, 679(1): 31741, SHAC.

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115 Several lighthouses in these places were first established in 1945 and 1946: see List of lighthouses, light-vessels, buoys, beacons, etc., on the coast and rivers of China, 1947 (Shanghai: Statistical Department of the Inspectorate General of Customs, 1948), pp. 8–63.

116 Thai, China's war on smuggling, pp. 209–214.

117 7 March 1946, in Chang (ed.), The Chinese journals of L. K. Little, Vol. II, p. 14.

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