In October 1934, agents from the Chinese Maritime Customs Service received a hot tip that an otherwise unremarkable village off the coast of Shandong was hiding valuable contraband. A search party dispatched to investigate verified the claim after raiding several homes and uncovering sixty-nine bags of sugar. Seeking to add to this already sizeable haul, agents then scaled the walls of another home and discovered ten more bags hidden in the backyard. This time, however, they were met by incensed homeowner Yu Guangbo, who charged at the intruders with a pitchfork and seriously injured an officer when he tried to seize a handgun. His resistance was fierce but, ultimately, futile. Outnumbered, Yu was quickly subdued, beaten, and bound. Left alone in the village temple, he untied himself the next day before reporting his harsh treatment to a local court and inaugurating a lawsuit that would last almost a decade.

This article explores the ambiguous role of coastal smuggling during the first decade and a half of Communist rule (1949–65). Fearing that the illicit flow of commodities siphoned critical revenues and undermined foreign policy, Communist China repurposed and expanded Nationalist China's war on smuggling while employing novel tactics of mobilization. Yet smuggling was not just a threat; it was also a lifeline that alleviated widespread material shortages and supplied the everyday needs of individuals and firms during the tumultuous transition to central planning. Businesses from ‘underground factories’ to state-owned enterprises relied on black markets to meet ambitious production targets and circumvent bottlenecks in official supply channels. Smuggling was thus more than just ‘corruption’ practised by officials—it was also a ‘creative accommodation’ employed by broad swaths of social actors coping with the enormous changes. This article argues that the nascent command economy and the vibrant underground economy existed symbiotically rather than antagonistically. Exploration into this complex relationship reveals many cross-border connections between Communist China and the capitalist world that both complemented and undermined domestic state consolidation.

This paper traces the history of the Chinese fire insurance industry and Tai Ping Insurance, one of the most successful Chinese insurance companies in the early twentieth century. It provides a case study on the “indigenization” of fire insurance in China by retracing how a fledgling firm mastered selling a foreign financial product and managed to win market share in an ostensibly adverse environment. This paper argues that while Tai Ping benefited from the growing embrace of insurance by the Chinese public, its success was ultimately driven by the company’s economies of scale, cross-selling synergies, and tight connections to banking. This paper also explores the broader context in which fire insurance operated by examining how the indigenization of insurance in China unfolded, with Chinese insurers like Tai Ping mediating the introduction of a new financial product, the transfer of new institutions, and the diffusion of new knowledge regarding risk. More generally, the history of Tai Ping and the Chinese fire insurance industry addresses a research lacuna in the history of insurance beyond the developed markets in Western Europe and North America, which has typically focused more on the experiences of British and American multinational enterprises and less on that of native companies. By highlighting the degree of institutional convergence and divergence between the Chinese insurance industry and its global counterparts, this paper contributes to a more inclusive history of the internationalization of insurance.

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