The floating community of the Min: River transport, society and the state in China, 1758--1889.

摘要

This dissertation provides a multi-faceted study of riverine boat transportation in China during the Qing period (1644–1912) by focusing on the history of the Min River transportation trade in Fujian province during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. While the economic importance of riverine transportation during the Qing is well recognized, what is less understood is how the river transportation trade, by providing an alternative, mobile livelihood for the population excluded from China's dominant agrarian society, also played a significant role in the social, cultural and political life of numerous localities.; I argue that the men and women who operated boats on the waterways in diverse localities throughout China, together with the local officials who sought to administer them, formed a diverse variety of “riverine communities.” These communities were constituted by the interconnected operation of distinctive forms of social life, commercial organization, religious practice, technological infrastructure and administrative policy. Each chapter explores a different aspect of Fujian's riverine community, paying special attention to how this community was impacted by a larger historical context of expanding population mobility, increasing occupational diversification and deepening concern among all levels of society over the preservation of livelihoods.; Chapter Two considers the rugged riverine geography of Fujian and the long-term effort to develop transport routes through the province. Chapter Three analyzes the active role local officials took in governing Fujian's rivers as they negotiated the tension between a desire to maintain an agrarian-based, settled society linked to the land versus a determination to preserve all people's livelihoods, including those of China's growing mobile laboring population. Chapter Four considers boats as both “tools of the trade” and cultural symbols on the rivers. Chapters Five and Six explore various components of the work regimes of two different groups of river workers, the “bachelor sector” on the upper Min River, and the women of the Dan boat families who constituted the “familial sector” on the lower Min River. Chapter Seven analyzes the dispute that arose between Qing officials and British diplomats over the first introduction of steam boats on the Min by British traders, and Chapter Eight concludes this study with a discussion of a large-scale feud battle that erupted between sojourning boat workers and dock workers on the upper Min during the late nineteenth century. I argue that this conflict, which took officials more than six months to suppress, highlights how the atmosphere of tension and competition in the province by this time had an especially strong impact upon the region's large population of mobile workers.