Businessmen and the Social of Modern China's Southwest Frontier - with the Northwest of Yunnan as the Center

Author: Zhou Zhisheng
Publisher:
Publish Date: 2006-05-01
Features: In the modern history of China, the northwestern region 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 where the commodity economy continued to thrive in the modern history of China, the rapid expansion and penetration of the commodity economy exerted a series of powerful impacts and profound influences on this ethnic region, which was based on self-sufficient traditional agriculture and animal husbandry and had relatively slower social and economic development. As a result, it became a microcosm of the social and economic transformation of the northwestern ethnic regions of Yunnan. The merchants of modern northwestern Yunnan 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 existing 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 stage of commerce in the southwestern frontier of modern China as the main research subjects, exploring the specific interactive relationships 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.