...This chapter describes how the leaders in Shanghai, particularly Du Yuesheng, sought to legitimize their activities and to integrate their gangster systems with the new political and economic structures developed by the Guomindang state. Du was a key broker between the French authorities...

...This chapter outlines the provinice of Guomindang's blind trust in Western science and technology and how these interests resulted in the technocratic and instrumental misunderstanding of the nature of rice supply and consumption. It shows that the food problem legitimized the province's political...

...This chapter evaluates the Guomindang province's attempt to improve domestic rice consumption in Canton through the construction of the Canton-Hankow Railway. Once the Canton-Hankow Railway was complete, their technocratic triumphalism blinded their eyes to the complexity of the rice trade...

...This chapter reviews the overall consequences of the government's National Rice Promotion program. The marketability of Hunan rice was enhanced. The Cantonese rice merchants were suspicious of beginning new business ventures that involved Hunan rice. The Guomindang province's entirely technocratic...

... transnational business. The city was the standard for a series of innovative food control programs that a number of experts developed. The Hunan Rice Sales in the Canton Project was a significant feature of the government-developed National Rice Promotion Program. In developing the Program, the Guomindang...

... in an unprecedented famine in Canton in 1936. This book contends that the ways in which the Guomindang government dealt with the issue of food security, and rice in particular, is best understood in the context of its preoccupation with science, technology, and progressivism, a departure from the conventional...