National rice vs. foreign rice: Food, culture, and politics in modern Canton, 1900--1937.

摘要

This dissertation examines how the food supply of Canton was profoundly transformed within the context of global grain commercialization and the rise of nationalism in the early twentieth century. By exploring cross-border characteristics of the food supply of Canton---whose rice trade networks were more closely linked with the Southeast Asian rice markets than with the domestic grain trade of the Chinese hinterlands---I argue that the Chinese modern state's attempts to recast these transnational rice trade networks into a national framework was doomed to failure because government policy-makers were only concerned with statistical analysis, the precision of rice quantity measurement, and administrative efficiency. Unlike past scholarship that has favored quantitative methodologies, my research explores qualitative dimensions of foodstuff; specifically rice quality, dietary preferences, and local food culture. In early-twentieth-century Canton, the residents strongly preferred "foreign rice," originally imported from Southeast Asia via Hong Kong. Canton residents became accustomed to the superior quality of "foreign rice" as compared to inferior domestic rice shipped from the northern hinterlands of China---especially, Anhui and Hunan provinces. Taking the point-of-view of the rice-consuming public, my research traces the formation of the local dietary preferences and food culture of Canton within a historical context.;The scope of this research is not limited to a strictly local focus, however. I consider local rice consumption in Canton and the transnational rice trade centered in Hong Kong together, thereby challenging the nation as the fundamental unit of historical analysis. In the eyes of the Guomindang Nationalists, the increasing consumption of "foreign rice" by the Cantonese was nothing but a waste of national wealth and an insult to China's agricultural economy. Policy-makers in Nanjing and a number of scientists and social scientists---mostly trained in western universities in fields of science and engineering---never seriously considered the local particularities of Cantonese food culture or the variations in rice qualities. Hence, they could not realize the significance of rice quality in the market because this was not measurable in their quantitative knowledge. As this government policy monolithically treated all rice as a calculable object of social engineering program, local dietary preferences and particular consumer demand for higher-quality "foreign rice" became overlooked. Consequently, "national rice" supported by the central government was unable to match the brand popularity of "foreign rice" in the Canton rice market, and the coercive rice control policy that the government obstinately executed caused an unprecedented rice crisis in Canton in 1936 and 1937. What blinded government policy-makers, I contend, has to be found in the inner logic of the modern social-engineering program and scientific knowledge, whose fundamental rationale was bureaucratic efficiency.