Railroads and the Transformation of China
by Elisabeth Köll (Author)

About the Author
Elisabeth Köll is the William Payden Associate Professor of History at the University of Notre Dame.

About this book
As a vehicle to convey both the history of modern China and the complex forces still driving the nation’s economic success, rail has no equal. Railroads and the Transformation of China is the first comprehensive history, in any language, of railroad operation from the last decades of the Qing Empire to the present.
China’s first fractured lines were built under semicolonial conditions by competing foreign investors. The national system that began taking shape in the 1910s suffered all the ills of the country at large: warlordism and Japanese invasion, Chinese partisan sabotage, the Great Leap Forward when lines suffered in the “battle for steel,” and the Cultural Revolution, during which Red Guards were granted free passage to “make revolution” across the country, nearly collapsing the system. Elisabeth Köll’s expansive study shows how railroads survived the rupture of the 1949 Communist revolution and became an enduring model of Chinese infrastructure expansion.
The railroads persisted because they were exemplary bureaucratic institutions. Through detailed archival research and interviews, Köll builds case studies illuminating the strength of rail administration. Pragmatic management, combining central authority and local autonomy, sustained rail organizations amid shifting political and economic priorities. As Köll shows, rail provided a blueprint for the past forty years of ambitious, semipublic business development and remains an essential component of the PRC’s politically charged, technocratic economic model for China’s future.

Brief contents
Introduction 1
I • Competing Interests and Railroad Construction
1. Technology and Semicolonial Ventures 19
2. Managing Transitions in the Early Republic 53
II • Railroads in the Market and Social Space
3. Moving Goods in the Marketplace 91
4. Moving People, Transmitting Ideas 128
III • The Making and the Unmaking of the State
5. Professionalizing and Politicizing the Railroads 165
6. Crisis Management 193
IV • On Track to Socialism
7. Postwar Reorganization and Expansion 223
8. Permanent Revolution and Continuous Reform 254
Conclusion: The Legacies of China’s Railroad System 290
Appendix A: Jin-Pu Railroad organization chart, ca. 1929 301
Appendix B: Revenue of major Chinese government railroad lines (thousand yuan per mile of line), 1915–1935 305
Appendix C: Freight transported by major Chinese government railroad lines (yuan per ton), 1915–1935 309
Appendix D: Number of passengers by ticket class, major Chinese government railroad lines, 1918–1935 313
Appendix E: Average miles per passenger journey by ticket class, major Chinese government railroad lines, 1918–1935 317
Appendix F: Freight designated for export (tons), shipped from Hankou to Guangzhou and onward to Hong Kong by train, October 18–December 31, 1937 321
Abbreviations 323
Glossary 325
Notes 329
Acknowledgments
385
Index 389

Series: Harvard Studies in Business History (Book 52)
Hardcover: 416 pages
Publisher: Harvard University Press; 1 edition (January 14, 2019)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0674368177
ISBN-13: 978-0674368170