Merchants and Modern Southwest Frontier Society of China - Centered on Northern Yunnan

Author: Zhou Zhisheng
Publisher:
Publish Date: 2006-05-01
Features: In the modern history of China, the northwestern part of Yunnan was not only the birthplace of transnational merchant groups like those in Xizhou, Heqing, and Lijiang, whose business operations spanned China, India, and Myanmar, but also one of the most vibrant and dynamic regions in terms of commercial economic development and social economic transformation in modern Yunnan. It was a distinctive area in the southwestern frontier of modern China. As a multi-ethnic inhabited area with sustained development of commodity economy in modern Chinese history, the rapid expansion and penetration of commodity economy exerted powerful impacts and profound influences on this ethnic region, which was primarily based on self-sufficient traditional agriculture and animal husbandry and had relatively slower social and economic development. This also made it a microcosm of the socio-economic transformation in the northwestern ethnic areas of Yunnan. The merchants of northwestern Yunnan in the modern era were a special social group. In their pursuit of self-development and growth, they consciously or unconsciously created impacts of varying degrees, scopes, and natures on the original social system, exerting a series of profound influences on the social development of modern northwestern Yunnan. This book takes these ethnic merchants active on the commercial stage of the southwestern frontier of modern China as the main research subjects, exploring the specific interactions between these indigenous ethnic merchants and the social transformation of the multi-ethnic inhabited area of modern northwestern Yunnan, as well as the historical impacts they produced.