The Hierarchy of Calories? State Intervention, Food Rationing, and Food Smuggling in Occupied Tianjin (1937–1945)

Abstract

This article aims to advance the understanding of the wartime food experience in Japanese-occupied Tianjin. We argue that food accessibility in Tianjin was conditioned by one’s position within the collaborationist regime and the depressed marketing system. While the state asserted its monopolistic power over food allocation, determining individuals’ entitlement to grain by their racial identities, occupation, and residency, the flourishing clandestine trade suggested the state’s failure to support its monopolistic claim over the allocation of grain resources. Making distinctions between imposed regulation policies and human practices, this essay attempts to elaborate the process of empire-building from the top down as well as the bottom up.