![]()
Selda Altan, Chinese Workers of the World: Colonialism, Chinese Labor, and the Yunnan–Indochina Railway, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2024.Chinese workers helped build the modern world. They labored on New World plantations, worked in South African mines, and toiled through the construction of the Panama Canal, among many other projects. While most investigations of Chinese workers focus on migrant labor, Chinese Workers of the World explores Chinese labor under colonial regimes within China through an examination of the Yunnan-Indochina Railway, constructed between 1898–1910. The Yunnan railway—a French investment in imperial China during the age of "railroad colonialism"—connected French-colonized Indochina to Chinese markets with a promise of cross-border trade in tin, silk, tea, and opium. However, this ambitious project resulted in fiasco. Thousands of Chinese workers died during the horrid construction process, and costs exceeded original estimates by 74%. Drawing on Chinese, French, and British archival accounts of day-to-day worker struggles and labor conflicts along the railway, Selda Altan argues that long before the Chinese Communist Party defined Chinese workers as the vanguard of a revolutionary movement in the 1920s, the modern figure of the Chinese worker was born in the crosscurrents of empire and nation in the late nineteenth century. Yunnan railway workers contested the conditions of their employment with the knowledge of a globalizing capitalist market, fundamentally reshaping Chinese ideas of free labor, national sovereignty, and regional leadership in East and Southeast Asia.中国工人为建设现代世界作出了贡献。他们在新大陆种植园劳作，在南非矿山工作，在巴拿马运河等诸多工程中辛勤付出。虽然对中国工人的研究多关注移民劳工，但《世界的中国工人》通过考察1898-1910年修建的滇越铁路，探讨了殖民体制下中国境内的中国劳工问题。滇越铁路是"铁路殖民主义"时代法国在清帝国的投资项目，旨在将法属印度支那与中国市场相连接，以促进锡、丝绸、茶叶和鸦片的跨境贸易。然而，这一雄心勃勃的工程最终以惨败告终。数千名中国工人在恶劣的施工过程中丧生，实际成本超出预算74%。赛尔达·阿尔坦通过研究中文、法文和英文档案中记载的铁路沿线工人日常斗争和劳资冲突，提出在中国共产党在20世纪20年代将中国工人定义为革命运动先锋之前很久，现代意义上的中国工人形象就已经在19世纪末帝国与民族的交汇中诞生。滇越铁路工人以其对全球化资本主义市场的认知，对抗其雇佣条件，从根本上重塑了中国关于自由劳动、国家主权以及东亚和东南亚区域领导权的理念。"Selda
Altan brings a much needed and welcome perspective to China's labor history by
focusing on the international context of working-class formation during the
late 19th and early 20th century. Studies of class formation (and
fragmentation) in China have to date looked at the 'roaring 1920s' and the mid
1940s during the high points of the labor movement. Altan's focus on labor in
the construction of the Yunnan-Indochina railway is groundbreaking, expanding
the spatial dimensions of China's labor history to include transnational
dimensions and broadening the temporal treatment by suggesting that workers'
subjectivity preceded the labor movement and Nationalist revolution of the
1920s by at least a decade."—Joshua H. Howard, University of
Mississippi
"Selda
Altan's beautifully conceptualized and densely researched book analyzes the
transformative labor relations formed during the building of the
Yunnan-Indochina Railway in the early 20th century. Constructed in an area
contested among French colonial, British imperialist, and Qing China's imperial
administrations, this railway helped embed the complex norms of modernization
into China's borderlands. These persisting norms include the enormous
destruction of environment and habitat, the displacement and exploitation of
large numbers of people, the violence of racialized labor regimes, the
robustness of competing territorial and capitalist conquests, and more. Epic in
scale and yet minute in detail, this book is simultaneously a materialist
history; an intellectual history; and a history that intimately connects
conflicting imperial projects at the dawn of a new century."
—Rebecca E. Karl, New York
University
"Chinese
Workers of the World deepens our understanding of Chinese labor and politics
during the late Qing, an era of 'Imperial globalization.' France's construction
of the Yunnan railroad on China's periphery highlights the abuses of the
notorious 'coolie trade' as well as Chinese workers' resistance, which was
informed by their own networks that were global, regional, and local.Altan
offers a deft analysis of the formation of Chinese working class identity and
its complex relation to anti-Qing nationalist movements. A must read for those
interested in the politics of empire, labor, and the Chinese diaspora."
—Mae Ngai, Columbia University
"In
this meticulous study based on research in the French and British archives and
in Chinese sources, Altan suggests that the nationalists proved unable to unite
the diverse constituencies that opposed the French, yet she concludes that this
movement initiated the development of working-class consciousness.
Recommended."—M. Rossabi, CHOICE
赛尔达·阿尔坦通过关注19世纪末20世纪初工人阶级形成的国际背景，为中国劳工史研究带来了一个非常需要且令人欢迎的视角。迄今为止，对中国阶级形成（和分化）的研究主要集中在工人运动高潮时期的'轰轰烈烈的20年代'和40年代中期。阿尔坦对滇越铁路建设中劳工问题的关注具有开创性意义，她将中国劳工史的空间维度扩展到跨国层面，并通过指出工人主体意识至少比20年代的工人运动和国民革命早了十年，拓宽了时间维度的论述。赛尔达·阿尔坦这部构思精美、研究扎实的著作分析了20世纪初滇越铁路建设期间形成的变革性劳资关系。这条铁路建设在法国殖民者、英国帝国主义者和清朝帝国政府争夺的地区，助推了现代化的复杂规范深入中国边疆。这些持续至今的规范包括对环境和栖息地的巨大破坏、大规模人口迁移和剥削、种族化劳工制度的暴力性、相互竞争的领土和资本主义征服的顽固性等。这本书规模宏大却又细节丰富，既是一部唯物史学著作，也是一部思想史著作，更是一部在新世纪黎明时期将相互冲突的帝国计划紧密联系在一起的历史著作。《世界的中国工人》加深了我们对'帝国全球化'时期清末中国劳工和政治的理解。法国在中国边陲修建滇越铁路的经历，突显了臭名昭著的'苦力贸易'的虐待，以及中国工人基于其全球性、区域性和地方性网络而进行的抵抗。阿尔坦对中国工人阶级身份的形成及其与反清民族主义运动的复杂关系进行了巧妙分析。对那些关注帝国政治、劳工问题和华人散居的研究者来说，这是一本必读之作。在这项基于法国和英国档案以及中文资料研究的细致研究中，阿尔坦指出，民族主义者未能团结起反对法国的各种力量，但她认为这场运动开启了工人阶级意识的发展。推荐阅读。赛尔达·阿尔坦（Selda Altan）是兰道夫学院（Randolph College）的历史学助理教授，专注于劳动历史与帝国主义研究。她的研究以跨国视角为特点，结合中国、欧洲及全球历史，尤其关注劳工阶级在殖民体系中的形成与作用。作为一名杰出的学者，阿尔坦教授的研究涵盖多个领域，并在劳工与资本、帝国主义与现代化交汇的历史问题上提出了独到见解。
