Philip Thai is assistant professor in the department of history at Northeastern University. He received his Ph.D. from Stanford University, and he specializes in modern Chinese, East Asian, legal, economic, and diplomatic history. His book China’s War on Smuggling: Law, Economic Life, and the Making of the Modern State, 1842–1965 was published by Columbia University Press in 2018, and his interdisciplinary research has been supported by many organizations including the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS) and the Social Science Research Council (SSRC). He is currently at work on a new project exploring the many informal connections and underground economies across “Greater China” during the Cold War.

Coastal smuggling has been a thorny problem for successive governments in modern China. But while smuggling might have operated on the margins of the law, it was far from marginal in driving important historical changes. Introducing his new book, Philip Thai explores how campaigns against smuggling transformed everyday economic life and amplified state power, thereby offering new insights into modern Chinese social, legal, and economic history.