Smokeless Sugar

Part history, part biography, and part mystery story, Smokeless Sugar reveals how the concept of a national economy took shape in China by investigating the 1936 execution of Feng Rui, a provincial official who introduced modern sugar milling in Guangdong.

Examining the circumstances of Feng Rui’s arrest on charges of corruption, Emily Hill traces the construction of a Chinese national economy through cross-border interactions between industry and agriculture and between China and Japan. She makes the case that Feng was, in fact, a scapegoat in a multi-sided power struggle in which political leaders vied with commercial players for access to China’s markets and tax revenues. This illuminating study challenges conventional wisdom about the effectiveness of the Republican state in promoting national unity during the Nanjing decade and highlights continuities in official economic policies from the 1930s to the Communist era.

Emily M. Hill is an associate professor of history at Queen’s University.

Robert Y. Eng, author of Economic Imperialism in China: Silk Production and Exports, 1861-1932:
The intricate detective work of Smokeless Sugar provides a well-reasoned and documented exoneration of the unjustly executed agricultural reformer Feng Rui. Hill’s book is the first detailed English-language account of a remarkable program of state economic planning in Guangdong during the 1930s, which laid the foundations for the Communist government’s economic restructuring of the region in the 1950s. One of her most important findings is the vital role of the state in economic development during the Republican period.

Parks M. Coble, author of Chinese Capitalists in Japan's New Order: The Occupied Lower Yangzi, 1937-1945:
This is a very impressive work ... It uses the career and execution of Feng Rui as a way of analyzing several key themes in modern Chinese history – regional and national politics in the 1930s, the role of the state in fostering industrialization, international trading issues and development, and the problems associated with transforming agriculture in China. Hill’s scholarship is excellent; she has thoroughly combed the Chinese sources.