| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 105.3

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 105.3 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Asia

Kathy Le Mons Walker. Chinese Modernity and the Peasant Path: Semicolonialism in the Northern Yangzi Delta. Stanford: Stanford University Press. 1999. Pp. xiv, 330. $55.00.

Kathy Le Mons Walker examines the economic and social consequences of modernization for Nantong County and vicinity. She argues that the cotton trade in this Yangzi delta region underwent three stages of transformation in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries: a period after 1884, when foreign yarn entered Nantong; the era of "self-reliance" programs promoted by domestic industrialist Zhang Jian; and a move by larger merchant firms in the 1920s and 1930s to ally with bureaucratic capitalism and undermine the enterprises of the second stage. These stages, Walker argues, were part of a "semicolonial process" begun after the Opium War that brought new focus to Shanghai markets and created opportunities for northern delta merchants to win inclusion in the activities of this new commercial center. In the process, a class strategy emerged defining a "merchant path," despite contradictory interests within this class, which sought to reorganize the rural economy to meet the needs of urban-based capital. What most enhances the overall analysis in this study is the serious consideration Walker gives to the role of the peasant population; she concludes that peasant resistance to modernization constituted the only autonomous nationalist discourse of the period. . . .

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