Cotton and State Power in China: The First Hundred Years

In a 1929 survey of global cloth consumption, China was near the bottom: only four countries consumed less cloth per capita than China, and three of these were in sub-Saharan Africa. China with its dense population and limited agricultural land was unable to clothe itself. Almost one hundred years later, China is the world’s main producer, main exporter, and main consumer of textiles and garments: in 2020: 64 percent of the world’s yarn, 60 percent of its fabric, and 35 percent of its garments were produced in China. China’s rise to the status of textile superpower did not start, as is often assumed, in the reform era: already by 1952, China was a net exporter of cotton cloth; by 1967, it surpassed Japan as the world’s largest exporter of textiles. This talk traces China’s textile industry through five stages: (1) the standardization and scaling-up of cotton cultivation beginning in the 1930s, (2) the evolution of a brutally extractive system in the Mao years that mobilized rural labor for cotton cultivation while rationing cloth supplies below subsistence needs, (3) the transition from a muscle-powered to a fossil fuel energy regime in the late Mao years, and the parallel development of a synthetic fiber industry, (4) the abandonment of Mao-era textile towns in inland China and the construction of a new export-oriented textile industry in coastal China, and (5) the ecologically and politically risky move of cotton cultivation from the old inland districts to Xinjiang, now home to 90 percent of China’s cotton output.

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About the speaker:

Jacob Eyferth is a social historian of China with research interests in the life and work experience of nonelite people throughout the twentieth century. Trained at the universities of Berlin and Leiden, he has held postdoctoral fellowships at Oxford, Harvard, and Rutgers and taught at Simon Fraser University. Currently, he is associate professor in the department of East Asian Languages and Civilizations of the University of Chicago. Most of his work has focused on the countryside and on the mid-twentieth century, c. 1920–1970. His first book, Eating Rice from Bamboo Roots, is an ethnographic history of a community of rural papermakers in Sichuan. It won the 2011 Joseph Levenson Prize for the best book on China in the post-1900 category. He is currently working on a second book, tentatively titled Cotton, Gender, and Revolution in Twentieth-Century China, that uses cloth and clothing as a lens through which to analyze how the monumental changes of the twentieth century—revolution, collectivization, industrialization, etc.—transformed the lives of rural women.