| Abstract | This study probes the reasons for the slow development of the modern cotton industry in a country that was the world's largest importer of cotton yarn. Discarding theories that blame either the Chinese or foreigners alone, the study finds that the treaty-port system produced an excruciating deadlock as the actors spent years disputing the auspices under which the industry would develop. British India and Japan used the time to build up their spindle capacity. Thus the first major mill in China, the Shanghai Cotton Cloth Mill, founded in 1878 by Peng Ruzong, raised an adequate 500,000 taels but faltered in 1882 when the United States sent a gunboat to Shanghai to back up its own cotton-mill claims (an event later expunged from State Department publications). The mill's official support was cowed, the onset of the Sino-French war further disrupted its finances, and not until 1889-90 did the Qing bureaucracy resolve to press forward. Then the industry surged ahead, adding 417,000 spindles by 1896 and cutting the cost of production to 9.5 taels per bale of yarn, comparable to levels in India and Japan. The bureaucracy excluded foreigners from the field and tapped revenues ranging from Beiyang (North China) military funds and the Shanghai taotai's customs receipts to the weixing (provincial surnames) lottery in Canton. This early surge was cut short by the Treaty of Shimonoseki (1895) which shattered China's monopoly of domestic factory production. This defeat destroyed the chances of tariff relief, official support, millowner solidarity, and protection against inland cotton speculators for an industry that was now a partially foreign interest and would only become more so the more the government helped it. The yarn market was saturated by the overcapacity of India and Japan, the industry stagnated, and China took until 1915 to reach the million-spindle mark, a milestone passed by India in 1875. The study uses previously-untapped sources, including memoirs of textile promoters Zheng Guanying and Jing Yuanshan, millowner dispatches in the Haifang (Maritime defense) archives, unpublished State Department and British Foreign office dispatches, and articles in the Shanghai daily Shenbao. |
